The Waking
by birthsister
Summary: Spanning ten years, Lydia struggles with her power and how it defines her and her relationships. Peter/Lydia, Derek/Lydia, Stiles/Lydia Warning: Might be triggering for some interactions that straddle the non-con line. May be pushing the MA line. A HUGE thank you to my betas, who suffered through this more than they should have had to. You guys are awesome!
1. Chapter 1

The Waking

Part 1

Her fingers swept through her closet, traced the line and texture of the fine clothes, the silks and linens and labels that once defined her but now were just window dressing. And none of it relevant. Not today.

Instead she turned her attention to the high chest of drawers; a pair of jeans, a black pair of boots with knotty buckles and a dark shirt. The black leather jacket with the mandarin collar and after a moment of hesitation, the gloves. It would be cooler by moon rise.

_It was January, her first semester home from college. She was staring at a raging bonfire in the middle of the frozen woods, wondering how she had gotten there and worrying how she would get home. The tips of her fingers were blue with cold as she squatted to warm them, hoping maybe if she stayed still someone would find her before morning. Someone did._

_He watched her from across the fire, finally slipping quietly to her side and taking one of her frigid hands in his own. He might have been considered handsome, if he didn't inspire terror in its purest form in her. He had a strong jaw and those incredible Hale cheekbones. Tonight, the dimple in his chin was covered by the light goatee he grew to make himself appear older than the whelps in his pack. As soon as she saw his eyes, she knew exactly what had happened. She would know those eyes, even if he had been in wolf form. Especially in wolf form. _

_She dipped her head and scowled. "You." _

"_Me. Again." He had the grace to at least play the part of penitent with a dip of the head and a downward cast of his eyes. "I apologize," he said, rubbing his warm hands over hers in a brisk motion, "I'll try to be more specific in my compulsion next time. Hat, gloves, scarf...can't have you catching your death of cold, now can we?"_

"_You're an asshole," she replied._

"_Among other things." His head nodded in acknowledgment, then almost seemed to pout as he considered her. "You've grown into quite the lovely young woman, haven't you?"_

_She flipped her long red hair over her shoulder and tilted her head to regard him with condescending tolerance. "I've always been a lovely young woman, thank you."_

"_You were always a lovely girl. But you've grown...up."_

"_You're starting to sound like somebody's creepy old uncle," she smiled, a terse upward jerk of her lips that indicated no actual amusement whatsoever. "Oh wait, you are somebody's creepy old uncle."_

Her teenage vanity had, in the intervening years, given way to a wolfish pragmatism so she left her make up sparse, her hair a simple straight braid trailing down her back. She had tried cutting it once, in college, and they hadn't said anything. Wolf code for disapproval. Stiles had said she looked adorable which was just as bad. Now the long red strands hung nearly past her waist. She suspected someday she would be like a white haired lady Godiva, tramping through the woods with leaves and brambles going unnoticed until she looked as wild and unkempt as any proper harbinger should be. In the mean time, she maintained a certain level of decorum for the sake of her professional life. Predicting the dead, favoring the victor, holding the metaphysical space didn't so much pay the bills as get you a luxury suite in the Beacon Hills psych ward. So she squandered her family's wealth and played at being a theoretical physicist, collecting awards like Stiles collected bowling trophies. It was, technically, cheating. If she sat still, let her mind slip into the cracks between her human world and the place the Morrigan inhabited, all the secrets of the universe practically did a jig for her. It was the mental equivalent of anabolic steroids, she supposed, but it would have been selfish of her to be stingy with her gifts. At least that's what she told herself in the many long lonely nights she spent awake, just her and her insomnia.

She noticed, on occasions like these, when the pack's emotions ran high and their wolves were near the surface, that the ridged white scars on her rib cage ached. It wasn't painful, exactly, more like an electric current looking to complete the circuit. That part of her that would never have a physical form reaching out toward its kin.

_His tongu_e _flicked along the scars and suddenly her skin seemed too small to contain her. She choked and gasped as he traced each one in turn, the only man she ever let touch them let alone see them. She reached over her head and gripped the headboard to keep from pushing his hands away as he splayed his palm over her rib cage, his fingers taking on the contours of the claws that put them there. If she had been wolf, she would have whimpered and crawled to him on all fours, ears back in submission and tail poised in invitation._

_He growled. He actually growled as he flipped her over, his breath a warm chuff on her neck as he nuzzled her, hands maneuvering her hips into position. _

"_You better not be sprouting fangs back there," she said, her voice cross even as she leaned into him. "Wow," she muttered, "this position is taking on a whole new meaning."_

"_I've got better control than that," his voice was warm on her ear, his body hot as he angled himself across her back, his own hips coming into alignment with hers._

"_Control, huh," she bit her lip against a smile, turned her head to stare over her shoulder into eyes that glowed a hot Alpha red. "How much control?"_

_They all had control, she knew, but she trusted his so much more than she trusted Peter's. Even more than she trusted her own._

She didn't know how long she stood in the entryway staring at the key to her SUV, but day had dimmed to gray twilight. She felt, for a moment, the shadow of him with her. Many hims, and once or twice a her, wrapped Lydia in a tight psychic cocoon. While Lydia knew Alphas were just as often female, it had never occurred to her that they would also seek out her particular brand of gift giving. Not until the first one had come to her, the woman tall and shockingly blonde and Lydia had been unable to say no.

"I'm a good Alpha, but I'm getting old," she had said. She laughed nervously, like a blind date revealing their income. Something that couldn't be easily changed but shouldn't have to be apologized for. "Well, not _that_ old, but old enough that other packs think they can come pick my bones."

She had stared at Lydia in that way the wolves had of taking someone's measure before she took a deep breath and verbally rushed forward.

"Grant me your gift of sovereignty so that I can hold my territory a little longer. Until my daughter is old enough to lead." Lydia could hardly turn down such a reasonable request. So she hadn't. But encounters like that were a one time occurrence, a pebble in her stream of consciousness. Her encounters with the Hales were more like surfing a white water rapids. It was Titanics and icebergs and ripples the size of continents.

A last glance in the hall mirror showed a woman in her late 20's with red hair pulled back severely from a round, pretty face, but nothing more. From behind her there was no glow of wolfish eyes, no flash of dark choppy hair, no scruff on a face far too delicate to be so dangerous. She closed her eyes and slid into that moment between the first breath and the last to make sure it was her own fear of being found out that put the Hale pack Alpha in her front hallway. All that came to her was the weeping power of the one who was dying, like water leeching through rock, and her own guilty conscience. She was the Hale family banshee. Someday she would feel all of them wash over her in one way or another, but tonight was not Derek Hale's night.

It had been twelve years since the power had come to her like a lover stealing through her window in the dead of night. It had brought ten years of sticks and leaves and blood and bonfires. Ten years of breathless lovemaking in the stark elegance of a spartan bed in a spartan loft. Ten years of being the little banshee passed around at the party until Lydia Martin had grabbed the power of the Morrigan by the throat and forced her to submit. She was done being used, even by herself.

"_Why do you let them use you like that," he asked, dabbing gently at the fresh blood over her eye._

"_I don't 'let' them do anything. It just...happens." She tried to twist away from him but he gently caught her chin, turned her face to his. _

"_I won't even pretend to get this hold they have over you, but the Lydia Martin I know has never let anything 'just' happen to her. Even that night," she saw him swallow hard, as though he could swallow the memory itself, "Even that night I found you on the lacrosse field, I saw how hard you struggled. You fight," he grabbed her chin again when she turned her face away, "you fight even when you don't have to."_

_She had wanted him to scream at her, have one of his Aderal fueled hissy fits. She expected him to be loud and angry and tell her with broad sweeping gestures that "this is the last time, I swear to God Lydia, the last time" like every other time before she had called him crying and angry and he had ridden to her rescue in his patrol car like a knight with bubble gum lights. The calm was unnerving._

_She leaned forward and pressed her head against his shoulder, the cheap fabric of his uniform jacket itching against her skin. He sighed and wrapped his arms around her. She tried not to shudder when he grazed the places that really hurt._

"_I should arrest them," he said quietly, after a moment. "I can do that, you know. I have handcuffs."_

"_On what charge? Consensual supernatural sex?"_

_He pushed away from her and stood up, flinging his arms in the air in frustration. One hand came to rest on his gun belt, the other pointed at her. _

"_This...THIS isn't consensual." His hand sketched wildly in the air, like he was coloring her in. "Look at you. Jesus freakin' Christ Lydia, look at you!" She couldn't see herself, but had seen herself on other full moons, mud in her hair and scratches on her bare skin. It had started in high school with a two day walkabout and now happened whenever the pack needed a little psychic boost. A little witchy energy. The wolf would call. And she would come. And her favor would guarantee him victory. Derek would send her home in a cab with apology in his eyes. Peter would send her home with blood on her clothes._

"_This isn't from him." She gingerly touched her eye. She wasn't lying, that particular injury was from her own carelessness. The others, beneath her clothes, oozing and aching, were a different matter. "I just need to learn to watch where I'm going in the dark." And perhaps learn what every fairy tale taught every child from the time they could pick up a book; don't go in the woods at all after dark._

"_What you need is to find somewhere they can't find you. Work some of your mojo and create a psychic restraining order or something."_

The leaves crunched under her feet, her breath plumed in front of her nose even as she resisted putting on the gloves. Cold hands were such a human concern when she was surrounded by beings whose fur always warmed them just beneath the surface of their own skin. She walked through the grove, each tree in winter sleep but the Nemeton. It dozed, a capricious beast on a long chain. She walked past each inch of ground that had tasted her blood and Peter's seed, feeling its awareness on her. A subtle shift in the currents of power, a ripple unaccounted for, a slip stream of scorn.

She could sense the others as she approached. Like hearing familiar voices in a crowd, she could pick each one out of the buzz of supernatural white noise. Derek's pack, and Scott's. Even Stiles, whose energy looked like a manic Jack Russel terrier running circles around the agitated wolves, but felt like cool, clear days in the quiet woods. She would need him tonight, and most likely deny herself his comfort. She knew they could insulate each other against the grief of the packs, but she would take far more from him than she could give. That had always been the nature of their relationship.

She had tried leaving. Had tried hiding with Jackson in London, had tried research at CERN in Switzerland, had tried an internship in the remotest parts of East Bumblefuck, Australia but she had either felt something inside of her withering, like a flower longing for the sun, or that same something had called to the local packs like some kind of metaphysical dog whistle. She enjoyed a good romp as much as the next girl, but choice was not something she was willing to give up. The inevitable full moon festivities finally sent her to ground with the two lovers who at least put forth the veneer of courtesy. They all wanted a piece of her, and some were determined to take it in chunks.

_Peter wasn't unskilled or uncaring. She'd had more callous encounters with boys at college, in the backs of cars and pressed up against the cool tile of the sorority house bathroom. It was the casual acceptance, on both their parts, that he would call and she would come that infuriated her. _

"_Do you know what tonight is?" he asked that first full moon, that January she had found herself cold and afraid in front of a bonfire in the woods. He slowly twirled a strand of her hair around his finger, fascinated by the play of light and shadow on the long strands._

"_The night before you get served with a restraining order?"_

"_It's the Wolf Moon," Peter was always a firm believer in the ignore it until it goes away school of thought, so he pressed on as though he didn't hear her. "Traditionally it's our night of initiation. But," he shrugged, his mouth forming that almost pout again, "that hasn't happened since the fire. Nowadays everyone is off trying to be human, going to college, pretending to be real boys and girls. Meanwhile, they're neglecting their duties here." His voice took a hard edge, no longer playful, barely restraining his anger, "To their pack. To their territory. The magic is weak, little witch, with only me holding our territory."_

_She had been trying to ignore that little detail about herself, like a blemish she thought no one else would see if she didn't acknowledge it herself. That link to their world that Peter Hale had kindled in her with a bite, that she couldn't sever no matter how hard she tried. He had flayed her open and something else had crept in to replace the life that had flowed out. _

First it had been the banshee. Then the power matured and she had become the Morrigan. She should have become some frightful creature, but she was still only a pretty red head with excellent fashion sense and an uncommon interest in physics, math, and dangerous men.

The banshee made her a Geiger counter for death, but the Morrigan took her banshee power and magnified it through a kaleidoscope. It became her ability to influence victory, to draw power from the telleric currents into herself and act as a conduit for the energy that sparked a wolf's 'Alpha-ness'. The Morrigan's power is what made her a highly sought after commodity. Hunted, even. And because the Morrigan was a sexual creature, there was only one way to transfer the power. That had been just an added bonus, until word got out about the Hale banshee. Then it became just an added bonus for anyone else. For Lydia, it was a liability.

Lydia felt the power flare up inside her whenever there was any conflict that might require her intervention. Her spider sense was all about sex and violence. Usually she tried to hold it at bay with visions of sines and cosines, like a teenage boy asked to go to the blackboard in the middle of a Selena Gomez fantasy. A girl sometimes had to play hard to get, even when she felt like she had just downed a tab of supernatural Ecstasy with a Viagra chaser.

_He angled himself in front of her and took her other hand, cupping it between his own two and blowing warm breath on it, never taking his eyes off hers. It was uncommonly chivalrous from a werewolf whose moral compass tended to spin with the direction of the wind._

"_You know there are a dozen ways to kindle magic in the land. I could rip your throat out right now, let your life bleed out at the Nematon and that would sustain us for years."_

_Her already pale skin blanched and Peter laughed. A short, hard, mirthless sound. "But, that would be short sighted of me. And messy."_

_Collecting herself, Lydia jerked her hands roughly away from him and tossed her hair back, out of his reach. "You have no idea." The offhanded way she could discuss her own brutal end used to startle her at first, but she had spent the past two years learning to tap the secrets he had unwittingly given her the key to. Killing her would assure a prosperous year for him and the stragglers of his pack, maybe even protect them for a decade or more, but it would be killing the golden goose. Allowing that much energy to bleed back into world all at once would require a balance, an offering on Peter's own part. Killing the Morrigan had consequences. Whether he gave it willingly or the Universe took it from him was irrelevant to Lydia. She was satisfied knowing if it ever came down to it, karma was her bitch._

Ahead of her, the house was a dim silhouette surrounded by the solemn comfort of trees. Restored to some of its old dignity, it was a harbor for a pack that was learning to live in a new kind of world. While she lived and worked her magic here, it was, for all intents and purposes, hallowed ground to the wolves. Protected space. Her gift ensured there was always a Hale on Hale land, or at the very least a champion to protect what was theirs.

On the porch, she caught the glint of metal, a flicker and shine that winked at her at an even pace from one end to the other. When her foot falls were close enough for a human to hear, Stiles turned to her, his arm extended to support himself against the porch rail, the other resting habitually on his belt buckle. They stopped and stared at each other in awkward silence, his mouth a thin, tight line, his deputy's badge reflecting the moonlight. There was something ancient in his eyes now and it made him look sad. Haunted.

_His hands traced circles on her bare shoulder. She looked at the moon filter through her window to glint off the newly minted badge tossed and forgotten on the desk, the shoes kicked to the four corners of the room, his uniform shirt hanging off her lampshade. She lay in his arms, oddly calm, and knew Stiles was tracing Druidic glyphs on her without even realizing it._

_It had been a mistake. She knew that the moment he slid into her. She knew it the moment she felt his tongue slip between her lips and he had cupped her face like it was something fragile. She knew it as he backed her toward the bed, each step like a question mark that hung between them until she was on her back and his hands were already up her skirt and inside her panties even as he raised himself on one elbow and looked into her eyes. Really looked at her, pressed his lips to her ear and asked "Are you sure?" It had been a mistake to nod assent because if she had _said_ yes, the tears would have started and not stopped until every Alpha of every pack was dead. A cock between her legs was a small price to pay to keep her friends safe, and Stile's cock was the only one who never wanted anything more from her than her. It was a mistake, she knew, as he moved gently inside her, because it would be a bitter memory every full moon that her Alpha called and she went to him. _

_It had been a mistake at twenty one and it was still a mistake at twenty three when his lips finally found the bruised and scabbed flesh left by the full moon and he had stopped his slow and unhurried rock toward her climax, his tongue sliding over his teeth as he tasted the blood on her. _

_He rolled off with a sigh, the distance between them profound as he pulled her against him, tucking her head under his chin and holding her against a chest that had filled out in adulthood to solid and masculine proportions._

"_I won't be that guy, Lydia," he had said. His fingers traced, up and down, thumb to finger and around in complicated patterns._

"_I have loved you since I was eight years old, but I won't be just one more guy who uses you." She felt the upward sweep of his fingertips, a downward motion of his thumb and wondered what he was tracing. Was it protection? Love? Regret?_

"Did Scott call you?" His hand left the porch rail to scratch nervously at the back of his neck. The hundred or so voicemails she hadn't returned hung like a huge white elephant between them. Stiles had the tenacity of Job, and she knew that even if she had to let him go, getting him to let go of her might take more magic than the both of them had, combined.

She cocked her head at him, eyes huge in the cast off light from the house as she waited for him to mentally catch up.

"Oh, right, yeah. I guess no one needed to call you, huh?" He turned toward the door, back to her, uncertain whether he should invite her in, realizing it wasn't his place to, and then realizing it didn't matter all almost simultaneously. "I guess, I guess if you're here, that's it. Then?" He looked uncomfortable, more awkward than usual. Lydia didn't know if it was her presence or his place at a death bed vigil that brought back some of his teenage mannerisms, but even standing still he seemed to vibrate. He looked unsettled and caught in his own skin.

"I, uh, I don't suppose," he turned and looked at the door again, swiveled his head around to look at her a moment before his body caught up. "I don't suppose you're here to, uh, to help him? Are you?"

She mounted the stairs, aware of each scuff of her boot on the tread, each consciousness holding vigil behind the door, and the dying man in the parlor whose energy was slipping like a waning moon.

"I," Stiles began as she mounted the last step to come level with him, "I don't know what I'm supposed to tell them. I'm an Emissary, and I don't have any answers."

"Deaton?" she asked. She didn't sense him, and doubted he would come. He had been trying to step aside as the Hale Emissary for years, and had no love for Peter. He would consider this a life skills lesson for Stiles. Deaths happened in packs all the time, though not usually from a wasting illness. He would have mixed his potions and prayed to his gods, as a favor to the Hale family, but in the end it mattered as much as leaves tossed in a fast moving stream.

Stiles shook his head. "Nothing. But, I think he considers Peter to be a waste of fur, honestly."

She smiled, a rueful upward turn of her lips, before bowing her head against his. There was apology in both of their eyes. "You don't need to tell them anything. I've got this, tonight." She approached the door, looking at him over her shoulder before putting her hand on the door knob, "It's the Wolf moon, after all."

_Peter bowed his head, his hands clasped in front of him as he balanced on his haunches._

"_I'm obviously going about this all wrong." He raised his head and tried to smile at her, but it came off as mocking. Lydia would know, she spent most her life mocking the world around her, too. The only difference between his mockery and hers was that while he wanted to be smarter than everyone else around him, she knew she was._

"_You might consider at least dinner and a movie before suggesting blood play," Lydia tossed her hair again and tilted her head at him, her contempt obvious. "In your case dinner, a movie, and a small expensive car."_

"_Listen to me, Lydia," He ignored her again, his voice taking on the urgency of a man running out of time. Lydia considered it the equivalent of a boy crashing and burning in front of his frat brothers. She'd seen enough of those, had been the cause of enough of those, to be well versed with the signs._

"_I'm listening," she said in an almost sing song voice, "But all I hear is blah blah blah." She focused on a point just beyond the fire, realizing she was warm now, her power like a furnace slowly stoking inside her._

_He grabbed her arm, pulled her to face him. She looked him in the eye, pursed her lips and slid her gaze around him as though he weren't there. His hand tightened on her and she flicked her eyes back to his, now glowing blue and reflecting the fire light. It wasn't so much a redirect of her attention as her challenge to him to hurt her more. The power of the Morrigan swelled inside her, and he felt it, glancing quickly at his hand where it gripped her arm before staring at her face again._

"_Listen. To. Me." he punctuated each word with a little shake. "There are," he paused, his head moving back and forth as though searching for the right world, "There are _things_ out there. Things that know our power is scattered, that know I'm not the true alpha on this land, that know I'm like a head with no limbs. Scott, and Isaac, and Cora, and all your furry little friends will come home from playing dress up in their human skins and find nothing." He hissed the last word, as though it were too horrible to be spoken aloud. "The Nemeton will be razed and my pack, YOUR pack, will be scattered like ashes. All I need," his voice took on its more normal cadence, as though he realized that once again he was trying to catch a fly with vinegar instead of honey. "All I need is the grace of the Morrigan, your _favor, _to hold the land until Derek or Scott get back."_

_As he explained to her the gravity of the situation, he moved more and more into her personal space, until he barely needed to lean forward to press his lips to her ear. "I've been inside your mind, being inside your body would be, anti-climactic, I think."_

_"That's hardly a selling point," she answered, turning her face to the moon. "Besides, you would have left me for dead."_

The house, quite honestly, had been impossible to rebuild. They had left the porch and the facade but stripped the timbers behind it to the foundation and started over. Sometimes, if she caught a draft just right, Lydia thought she could still smell the charred wood.

He lay in what would have been the side parlor in the original house, his face unchanged from the first time she saw him; handsome, frightening, all swagger and teeth stalking her from across the lacrosse field while she stood there wearing a pretty party dress like a shroud. It had been twelve years since his attack had burned out part of the human in her and left something else confusing and terrifying. It had not been just twelve years but twelve hard years by anyone's standards. Still his werewolf metabolism had kept him as unaged as Dorian Grey even as he stood with one foot over the threshold of death.

His eyes snapped open when her scent entered the room, tracking her with a predatory intensity, but he lacked the strength to do anything else. Not even give her one of his sardonic grins. Lying on a couch, his spirit a small desiccated thing, he could still strike a chord of terror in her little banshee heart.

She felt Scott come into the room behind her, his energy like a boulder in an eddying stream. She let it fill her before sending it back to him, bolstered and heavy with power. She was not Scott's banshee, and his standing as a True Alpha had given him a power that seemed incompatible with hers. It was a small blessing she was thankful for since it had managed to preserve her friendship with Allison all these years. Instead, she could roll around in Scott's energy like a dog in the grass, sharpen it, change it, and give it back to him a little stronger for its brief association with her.

The McCalls and the Hales were full, strong packs now. But the other members would be in their homes living their human lives tonight. It was this, the inner circle, who managed the death of one of their own. She felt Cora, back in the kitchen, like sensing a deep, wide quarry. Isaac was with her, a cool reflective lake. He worried Lydia the most, never suited to be an Alpha, barely a beta, if his pack floundered he would be condemned to the life of an Omega.

Derek. Derek was the cliffs standing before the ocean, equally holding it back and being eroded by it. She breathed in his power and it skittered along her spine to tingle in places best left unmentioned in polite company.

"_Well," she said, marching purposefully across the loft, her high heels clacking against the wood floor. "This at least is an upgrade from rolling around in the leaves." She tossed her pocketbook on the couch, stared at it a moment to assure herself nothing would soil it, and kicked off her Manolo Blahnik high heels. Derek's eyebrows quirked when she went from a leggy 5'7" to 5'3" in .2 seconds._

"_Have you even HAD sex in the middle of the woods in January?" She paused, considering who she was talking to, her bright red lips pursed together in a mew of thought. "Of course you have. That's not the point, the point is, it's cold, and crunchy, and I don't enjoy it. So," she scanned the room then made a beeline to inspect the bed. "I hope you at least changed the sheets."_

_He watched her, probably uncertain whether to be amused or aggravated. "You left the door open," he said._

"_I know. It's heavy. I didn't want to break a nail." She looked at her perfect manicure, buffed off an imaginary piece of lint and waited. _

_His face settled on bemused as he walked past her and slid the door closed himself with little effort. She raised her eyebrows at him when the lock snicked into place._

"_I have a pack," he explained, "Who don't always respect my privacy." She shrugged, but it was a fair enough reason to be locked in with Derek Hale. It would have been unfortunate, too, if Stiles decided to take this night to come rescue her or something. But she knew where he was on these full moon nights. Sitting in his living room with a bottle of Jack and a scowl._

_Inside her, the Morrigan was a tempest trying to break free. She wondered if this is what it felt like for Scott and the others, when they couldn't control their wolves. Sixteen cups of coffee and an ounce of meth. She made herself slowly work her blouse free of her waistband in a show of measured control._

"_So, how does this work," she asked, giving the mattress a quick bounce and smoothing out the wrinkles in the comforter. It looked clean enough, and he'd had enough decency to pull the comforter up in a mock attempt at making the bed. She wondered if he hid his dirty socks and underwear under it, too, like any other self respecting bachelor. "We just bump uglies and POOF," she surged to her feet and flicked her fingers in front of her face to mime a small explosion, "You're the alpha again?"_

"_You have a poetic way with words," he said, crossing the room after what seemed a long and needless assessment. Even if he didn't find her particularly attractive, and really, he'd have to be gay not to, she thought, she was all there was. There was no second string Morrigan, no plan B, just Lydia Martin and the power that was breaking along the surface of her skin like an encroaching storm surge. The Morrigan approved. She knew this Alpha, was eager to take his power from the interloper and give it back._

"_What's more important," he said, his voice softening, "is how do _you _want this to work." His six foot frame suddenly filled her space and she swallowed, uncomfortable with the heat coloring her cheeks._

_She turned back to the bed, fluffed a pillow. "You don't have to romance me. You're already a shoe in for the part."_

_He reached over her and took a hand, stopping her fussing. Turning her toward him, he slid calloused fingers along her jaw line until they cupped her face and tilted her head so she could see his eyes. They stared at each other, looking for some sign of what this was, what they were outside of the vortex of their power. His lips came down, softly, slowly, waiting for her acceptance or denial. When they touched, she sighed against him, gripping the seams of her skirt so her hands wouldn't fly up and crush him to her. He nipped lightly at her lip as he drew back._

"_Did Peter tell you to do that," she asked, knees shaking._

"_Peter said you don't like to be kissed." He still hadn't let go of her face, his thumb slowly stroking her cheek bone._

"_So then why did you kiss me?"_

"_Because I think you don't like to be kissed by Peter."_

Peter's power leaked off him in sickly waves, a poisoned well running dry.

"I, I don't know what we can do," Scott said behind her. "I didn't even know we could get sick. And Stiles," he lowered his voice, took her elbow and moved her deeper into the room, as though three feet of space and a few spare inches of drywall could protect their conversation from werewolf hearing. Nevermind that the fact that Stiles was the McCall pack Emissary was the worst kept secret in Beacon Hills. "Stiles says it isn't poison, and if it is, it isn't anything he's ever seen, heard about, or read about before. And if Stiles says it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist." Scott lowered his voice even more. "He even spoke to Deaton, and we all know his opinions on that."

"I know," Lydia agreed. It wasn't a poison of a kind they could find and neutralize. It was the venom of a wrathful goddess. She went to Peter, tucked the comforter around him, settled on the couch next to his long and solid frame and brushed a hand over his hair in an almost maternal gesture.

"Are you comfortable?" He barely nodded. "Good," she replied, "I'm not unkind. This doesn't have to be horrible. I know what I'm doing." And his eyes widened in understanding as she smiled.


	2. Part 2

Part 2

_Peter scoffed. "I didn't leave you for dead, I expected you to Turn." She lowered her head and looked at him from under her brows, green eyes baleful and unbelieving. "Well, yes, there may have been a wanton disregard for human life," he conceded, "But since you didn't die, this is just an added bonus. Remember, I had free reign inside that beautiful little head of yours. Who else but me 'really' understands you now? Those little school boys at college? That annoying ankle biter advising Scott's pack? Any of the wolves, Alpha or not, who sniff around your door like they're looking for a bitch in heat? Not one of them sees every single facet of you like I do. Not one." _

"_About that," she said, "Didn't we agree that you don't get to ring the doorbell inside my head anymore? You don't live here." she pointed at her temple. "Pick up the phone like everyone else."_

"_Like you would even take my call."_

_She hesitated. He had a point. "Our previous association does have some perks," he said, sliding his hand along her jaw to cup the side of her face, "How else would I know that you like to be kissed," He pressed soft lips to hers, the kiss deepening as she didn't pull away. He nipped at her full lower lip. "Like this."_

"_Don't do that," she said quietly. _

"_What? This?" He kissed her again, followed by the same playful nip at the end. The same way that any other boy could kiss her and make her knees quiver. "I can't infect you unless I'm in wolf form. And really, I can't infect YOU at all."_

"_Don't kiss me," she said, grabbing his chin in her hand and forcing him to turn his head. She let go of him abruptly, her eyes widening at her own lack of caution. It was like she had just put her hand between Prada and his food bowl and she counted herself lucky for not getting nipped. "I'll do..." she flapped her hand along side her head in the gesture universally used to chase away mosquitoes and people who talk too much, as she floundered for the right word. "It. You. Whatever." She couldn't ignore the Morrigan any more. She was like a beast raging to be free, an animal in heat aching to couple with someone, anyone, and she would take Peter Hale if there was no other. Lydia, personally, considered it the worst beergoggle of her life. "Just, don't kiss me."_

_She swung her hair back away from her neck and settled gingerly on her knees. The ground was cold and not even the Morrigan's heat could keep a chill from shivering up her spine. She could have been settling in for her own execution. Peter pouted at her again._

"_This doesn't have to be horrible. I'm not a bad looking guy. Really, all the Hale men are quite well put together."_

"_Werewolves," she corrected him, "Are quite well put together. Don't say it like it's a personal accomplishment." A thought crossed her mind. "Are there any fat werewolves."_

"_Metabolism." Peter answered, cocking his head at her as though he didn't quite understand the question. "Although, I seem to remember an Uncle Frank, or maybe he was a great uncle. But he was quite large. And the deer population that year was quite small. But," he smiled brightly, getting them back on track, "That's irrelevant to us now, since I don't have his appetite for venison, and even if I did, I guarantee I have slightly more self control."_

_Lydia twisted her mouth in silent disagreement. Self control was obviously relative._

"_Let's just get this over with," she said, sitting back on her heels._

_Peter looked affronted. "I realize our relationship needs to work through some issues, but you don't need to be so philistine about this. I know what I'm doing. You might even like it." He took a stick and poked at the fire, encouraging the flickering flames higher. "There," he said, almost kindly, "I don't want you getting chilled. Here, let me help you with that." He slid the buttons of her wool coat through each hole slowly and deliberately, sliding it off her shoulders and spreading it on the ground behind her. "I'd offer you mine, but as you can see," he held his arms wide to indicate he wasn't wearing a coat. "I've come unprepared."_

_Lydia pursed her lips. "I don't suppose you brought a condom?"_

_Peter hesitated a moment as something flickered in his eyes. He reached into a back pocket and pulled out a foil square. "Been a while since I had to buy one of these, so I stole it from Cora."_

"_With charm like yours, I can't imagine why." Her smile was terse as she scooted back farther on the coat._

_When Lydia had decided that Jackson was 'the one', she had gone into the inevitable loss of her virginity like she prepared for the SAT. She had started with the Kama Sutra, The Joy of Sex, 365 Sexual Positions, and progressed through every periodical and publication, online and off, she could lay her hands on. Her months of protestations and slapping away of hands from her pretty pink panties had been more akin to test anxiety than any kind of attempt at purity. When she finally decided she was ready, the resulting encounter had been more like a pop quiz than the SAT, but her months of preparation had at least quelled the 'first time jitters' she heard every other girl talk about. As Peter approached her with a predatory gleam in his eye, she could honestly say she felt like any other pubescent virgin, the fear rising off her like smoke from the fire. He could probably smell it on her, and knowing Peter Hale, it was probably making him harder than anything she could consciously do to entice him._

_No amount of reading could prepare her for sex with a werewolf; a metaphysical orgy with her caught between the man, his beast, and her own dark power._

She kissed him. Her fingers traced the delicate space between his hair line and his ear, smoothing imaginary hairs back before cupping his cool face in her palm and lowering her lips to his. He tasted like the forest, loamy earth and fresh air, and something else. Something wild and unnameable. She felt the vibration in his chest as he groaned, and she breathed in the life force she took from him. He smelled like fur and fear and tasted like her.

_He moved toward her on all fours, stalking, his arms coming around her to hold her and ease her back onto the ground. Instinctively he moved to her lips, then nuzzled her neck when she turned her face away from him. His lips traced her pulse from her collar bone to her jaw as he settled his hips between her legs. She ground upwards to meet him in spite of herself. It could have been their first time or their sixth time. When she stopped to think about it, all their encounters superimposed over each other into one image._

_He wasn't unkind. He didn't rip her clothes off her, he always gave her the illusion of choice, as though she could get up at any point and simply walk away. She had no doubt, though, that if she tried he would stop her if the Morrigan didn't. He undressed her like he was unwrapping a gift, and slid his mouth over her skin as though lapping up the power that washed over her. And he was right, he did know what he was doing._

_His hands slid up under her camisole, teasing at her nipples, mouthing them through the thin fabric so that his hot breath was one more maddening sensation as the silk clung to her. He waited for her to arch against him before tracing the line of her hip to her inner thigh. By the time his fingertips slipped up under her skirt and brushed her panties, she was practically panting for it. In the summers he would lower his mouth to her, spreading her lips wide to tease his tongue over her until she was sobbing for release. In the winters, he kept her warm with his own body heat, always making sure a fire was stoked nearby. He had no idea the Morrigan was already burning her up inside._

_But no kissing. Kissing was intimate, and this was little more than a business arrangement. Kissing was for lovers, not mystical fuck buddies._

_She pulled his shirt off, making a moue of approval at the thick muscled chest, the shoulders that looked like he could bench press a small sedan, the happy trail the wandered from a tight stomach down past the waistband of his jeans. But she balked when he reached for the hem of her own blouse. _

"_No?" He frowned at her. "Are you going to let me take anything off you? I think the goddess needs something a little more than a hand job to make this work."_

"_Not my shirt," she tugged it back into place, smoothing an imaginary wrinkle out. "I never take off my shirt. For anyone."_

_Understanding slowly dawned on him as he slipped his hand underneath the hem, finding the thin folds of scar tissue on her side. They buzzed in response to his touch._

"_I put them there," he said matter of factly, "I think it's ok if I see them."_

"_I think if you try," she batted his hand away, "I will wear so much wolfsbane body spray that the next time you fuck me, you'll eat your own face. Are we clear?"_

_Peter's head, and hand, jerked back like he had been burned before he nodded, an amused smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "Point taken, little witch. So," he gently held her by the waist instead, "A guy does need a little encouragement. What would you like me to do...that won't get me killed."_

_She paused before taking his hand and placing it on her breast. "Over the shirt, under the shirt, I don't care if you chew through my panties. But the shirt doesn't come off."_

"_Duly noted."_

From the corner of her eye, Lydia watched Scott shuffle nervously from one foot to the other before he slowly retreated from the room. Although he had never once lost his Alpha status in the twelve years since he had achieved it, he also had never seemed to loose his boyish unease, either. Even in the company of his own pack, he acted like he was one wooden spoon away from being swatted for swiping a finger through the frosting.

She pressed Peter's cool face to hers, cheek to cheek, listened to the other signs of life in the house. A footfall and creak on the stairs, a long low sigh, the quiet thud of Stiles pacing the porch.

Lydia thought she heard Peter whimper as she put her hand over his faltering heart. He shuddered as her fingers, still cool from the outdoors, touched his bare skin. His heart tripped a little, a runner too long at a sprint stumbling over its own rhythm.

_They were so sweaty and out of breath that every time she tried to wrap her legs around him they slid off. Wolf stamina was no myth, and Lydia was convinced that if it weren't for her own supernatural prowess, she'd be nothing more than a boneless puddle of sweat with the interactive ability of a blow up doll right now. _

_For a brief moment she worried about how well her new birth control patch would hold up to this level of exertion before Derek's breath against her ear made her lose any train of conscious thought. He sounded like a Thoroughbred at the finish line, his face buried in the crook of her shoulder as he slammed into her with an animal ferocity. She grunted in frustration as her leg slid off his hip again and he reared up over her, eyes glowing a bright crimson red._

"_I think we're there," she panted, flinging a hand up to cushion her head before before it slammed into the headboard._

"_I think we were there about two hours ago," he drove deep into her and paused, resting inside her as he lightly traced the inside of her thigh with a clawed finger. She shuddered against him and he closed his eyes, concentrating on keeping the beast in check. When he opened them again it was his own muted shade that looked back at her, his claws retracting to calloused fingers that deftly found her swollen clitoris and gently brushed against it. "But _you're _not there yet." He applied a little more pressure, his thumb working in measured circles. _

_Lydia strained against him, wanting to feel the added sensation of his length gliding in and out of her. He shifted his weight to pin her hips, licked the pad of his thumb although it was completely unnecessary considering how wet she already was, and went back to work with lighter brush strokes._

_When she choked out a groan his other hand tugged down the neck of her silk camisole to expose a nipple, brushed over it once, then stopped. She opened her eyes to find his head tilted to the side, like a dog considering something it didn't quite understand. _

"_What," she asked, the sudden awkward silence chasing away some of the heat. Her eyes darted from one side of the bed to the other, trying to figure out what had suddenly piqued such careful interest from him._

"_Take this off," he tugged lightly at the lace strap, the only barrier left between Lydia and her Alpha._

"_No," her voice was incredulous, louder than it needed to be as she tugged it back over herself, smoothing it with shaking hands._

"_It's only a request," he assured her, taking her hand where it fidgeted nervously with the lace trim and nibbling lightly on a finger, "But I'd like to be able to see all of you."_

"_Uh, no?" She had a whole drawer full of lacy tops, silk camisoles and thin teddies just for her 'full moon dates' as she had come to call them. Just so this very issue wouldn't become, well, an issue. Every shopping trip her mother treated her to in Paris, Milan, and Harrod's of London started in the lingerie section and if the boys couldn't appreciate her consideration for them, then maybe next time she would just treat these little rendezvous with a little less effort and hike up her skirt and turn her face to the wall. _

_He tilted her face back to his with a single finger and lowered his mouth over hers. He stroked her lips with his tongue, giving her the option of pulling away before following with a deeper kiss. His tongue flicked lightly against hers before retreating._

"_You don't have anything to be ashamed of," he said, licking a rivulet of sweat off her neck. _

"_I'm not ashamed. Exactly," she turned her face away, tried not to enjoy the feel of his mouth as it moved from her neck to nip lightly at her ear. The Morrigan had left her hours ago, when she felt the power of the Alpha pass through her to Derek, leaving behind a metallic aftertaste of energy. It was just her and Derek now. _

_She looked him right in the eye. "Don't you have a bad guy to go vanquish or something?"_

_He smiled, as much as Derek Hale ever smiled, the Alpha flickering just under the surface like a malevolent thought. "I'm slaying other demons right now."_

_He slid out of her suddenly and she felt the emptiness like an ache as he caged her in his arms and peppered her face with soft kisses. She rolled in the confines of his body, one leg slipping past his to pull against the corner of the mattress for leverage. He didn't restrain her as he shifted his weight to lie behind her, one arm draped over her middle and the other sliding idly through her hair._

"_You don't have to run away," he said._

"_I'm not," she replied, sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to ignore his hand where it had moved to stroke her thigh. It wasn't a seduction, exactly (could it even be called a seduction after they had pounded away at each other for three hours) but a gesture of affection. "But mission accomplished. You're the big bad Alpha again and my job here is done."_

_Her bare feet touched the cool floor and she shivered. It was August, and she was due back at MIT in two weeks. She wanted to consider the months of normalcy at school a vacation but in all honesty, it had become more like a prison sentence. She felt like an orchid in a hot house, her roots cramped and threatened with rot. Here, she felt clipped and pruned. There were no good answers._

_Derek tensed behind her, his body losing the languid slouch of good sex and pulling itself back together, wrapping himself back in the layers of melancholy he used like armor. His lips rested against the dimple of her back, thoughtful._

"_You don't have to do this," he said, his voice low and muted against her skin. She froze as she leaned forward to pull away from him. He didn't resist or withdraw, resting against her skin to skin._

"_I have to leave eventually," she said, being intentionally obtuse. "I have school in two weeks."_

"_You don't have to come back."_

She had hoped it wouldn't take so long, both for his comfort and her own piece of mind. She wasn't cruel, his sacrifice was a necessary evil even if he deserved it. He had cheated death once already and she was only taking back what was hers. But Peter was a powerful wolf, Alpha or not, and siphoning off his power was a delicate procedure. Too fast, and the others would notice, or worse, her own power would glom onto theirs and take everyone it could grasp. Too slow, and his wolf would replace it with the flotsam from the Nemeton like a tub filling with water faster than it could drain.

It felt like hours since she had arrived, it could have just as easily been only five minutes when she slid to the floor next to him, nestled her head on the pillow next to his and stared into his blue eyes. They fluttered and closed as he struggled to speak.

"Shsh," she hushed him, "You don't need to say anything."

She moved her head to kiss him again, paused, her lips just a breath away from his. Her eyes flicked to the window behind the couch, to Stiles where he looked in on them like a voyeur, one arm supporting himself against the window pane and the other hooked in the buckle of his gun belt. Eyes wide with fascination and horror, lips parted as if to call out, the Emissary had his answer.

_She usually came so hard her ears popped. Peter's gift for the sacrifice she was making she supposed. But informed consent had not been part of the package their first night together and she had been blissfully unaware of the nature of her sacrifice. As she had seen the dawn crest the horizon she told him, "It's not going to happen. Orgasm is as much mental as physical and trust me, the mental isn't going there."_

_Peter had taken it as a personal challenge. "You'll make me look bad, if you say that."_

_She huffed out a frustrated sigh. She was sore and tired, the wool jacket under her back had left friction burns on her tail bone, and the lust the Morrigan had pulled out of her had fled with the transfer of power. This was where, had she been with anyone but Peter Hale, she would have tapped out, smiled politely and said she would call in a day or so before losing their number somewhere between their bedroom and her own._

"_I won't make you look like anything since no one else will ever know about this."_

_He smiled like he knew a secret. It was entirely possible he did. Peter usually made it his personal business to know every plot twist in every situation, even if many of them were in his own head. Lydia was under no delusion that he was to be trusted, but she was certain that he would protect the Hale territory to his last breath because in his mind it was HIS. She would have never agreed to the transfer of power, to gifting him with sovereignty if she thought for a moment he would take it and run._

_He slid his arm under her shoulder and cradled her head, an uncommonly gentle gesture as he nuzzled her, the bridge of his nose sweeping against her warm cheeks, her jawline, the shell of her ear. She gripped his shoulders, their breadth making her hand look tiny and child-like._

"_You don't have to-" she started, but he cut her off._

"_Consider it a matter of personal pride. Work ethic. Craftmanship." As he changed their rhythm she turned her head to stare into the dying embers of the fire. She imagined herself in the glowing spaces between the pieces of wood, like a warm, quiet room. She could almost pretend he was anyone else as something stirred in her in spite of herself. She locked her legs around him and rose to meet him, clutched at him as everything in her tightened and shifted. There was something to be said for a wolf with a mission._

"_Come for me, little witch," he whispered. Her fingers dug into his back and he arched and hissed before hunching his shoulders and driving harder. She knew she had been resisting him, resisting this because she didn't want him to make her feel good. She didn't want to feel anything for him but the polite loathing she had carefully cultivated for the past two years. _

_He gripped her tighter to him, his arm a vice around her back as he shifted position and she was in his lap. She ground him deeper into her and his head dropped back with a groan. He was letting her take control and she gasped at the added depth of him, just enough to send her shuddering headlong into her own orgasm. The first wave took her and his head snapped forward, his eyes deep Alpha red. She felt something in him shift, something imperceptible and terrifying, but she was riding the wave of her climax and that ten seconds of hesitation was all he needed. She felt his claws skitter up her back, under her shirt and she pulled away from them, but it only drew her closer to his body. She gasped and cried out, the scream pulling from the well of her power to tremble at her lips but he pulled her head into the warm fur of his chest like they were no different than any other lovers in the throes of their own climaxes. She had just found herself enough to dig her heels into the leaf strewn forest floor when his fingers found her scar and ripped. She felt him thrust once more, hard and deep, the ripple of his own release hitting her with a rushed exhale of breath thick with the scent of wolf, her own blood pumping out of her to leave her thigh slick and wet and warm. She panted against him, lost in the wave of pain, hearing the tinny tick tick tick of her blood hitting the stale winter leaves. _

_He combed through her hair with gentle fingers, shushed her as he nuzzled her ear._

"_Shshsh, it's ok." She drew in a shuddering breath, light headed and aching with pain and suppressed power. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he pressed her head into his shoulder like a child's. "I'm sorry, but I needed a little blood, just a little."_

"_I hate you."_

"_Well, you and everyone else." He shrugged under her head. "We all make sacrifices, little witch. And really, look," he leaned her back a bit, tugged at the bloodied hem of her shirt but she pressed her palm firmly over the wound._

"_When you're ready, then." He turned his gaze upward, taking in the rose colored morning, the ghost of the moon vanishing on the horizon. "I was very careful. I used your old scars. No point marking that beautiful skin more than we have to, right?" She lunged away from him and flopped like a beached fish onto her jacket._

"_I gave you what you wanted. I don't understand." She wiped furiously at her eyes, only realizing too late she had smeared the blood from her wound across her face like a gory mask._

_Peter stood up, brushed the crushed leaves from his body and reached for his pants. "You did, and I thank you for that. The pack, both packs, thank you. But you may have given me what I wanted without giving the Nemeton her due. I can't take that chance. Sex magic is powerful, but blood magic makes it stick, so to speak." He cocked his head to the side as he regarded her, a slim pale girl naked from the waist down and oozing blood all over an expensive designer shirt. She looked like a crime scene photo. He squatted beside her, ran his hand through her hair again from forehead to crown. _

"_Do you know how many endorphins are released with an orgasm? I genuinely didn't want to hurt you. Well," he corrected himself, "not more than I had to, anyway. C'mon then." His voice became eerily cheery. "Let's get you together, the sun's up, I'll give you a ride."_

"_I'm not going anywhere with you," she sat up abruptly, wincing and holding her side. It had already stopped bleeding, but the pain was enough to make her nauseous._

"_Well, you can't just sit out here half naked until someone finds you. And if you scream," his head bobbed from side to side, as though genuinely weighing the option, "You run the risk of bringing every supernatural creature beholden to your call to find you, well, with your pants down. That would just be awkward for everyone."_

"_I don't need to scream, I just need my fucking cellphone," she patted the ground around herself._

"_Your right coat pocket...it was digging into my knee all night." Lydia looked at him like he couldn't possibly be serious. He shrugged apologetically, reached for his shirt, and realizing she was starting to shiver draped it over her shoulders instead._

_She scrolled through her contacts with shaking fingers, trying three times to hit the right number. Her first attempt had dialed Sarah, her study partner at school, her second attempt hung up on Scott, and the third put her through to the voicemail for Siegfried's House of Chao. Finally tapping the right name, she put the phone to her ear and looked at him out of the corner of her eye._

"_You can go now."_

_He looked uncertain, like a date not sure if he should watch his lady walk to the door and get in safely, or just drive off._

"_I would feel horrible if something happened to you before you were safely indoors."_

_Lydia palmed the receiver of the phone and scowled at him. "You would feel horrible if your meal ticket to the Major Leagues got eviscerated by someone other than you." On the other end, a sleepy voice mumbled a greeting. She took a deep breath, put on a smile and moved her hand._

"_Stiles, hi! Yeah, it's Lydia..." She knew she was failing at keeping her voice calm as she heard him tumble out of bed, the jangle of car keys in his hand probably before he had even bothered to put on pants._

Her first instinct was to scream. It was the primary defense mechanism for a banshee, to draw supernatural power to herself like a Bat signal. She sucked her lips in and bit down on them, then glanced side to side to see if anyone else was watching her exchange with Stiles. Stiles mouth narrowed into a hard line as he pointed at the door, motioning in a circle like he was stirring a large pot with his hand, indicating that she should come outside. She glanced down at Peter and shook her head. Not yet. She wasn't done yet.

She heard him stomp a boot and watched him point emphatically next to his side. He wanted her there. Now. She sighed. Stiles could be intractable. She could go to him now, or she could wait until he marched inside and grabbed her, calling down unwanted werewolf attention.

She patted Peter's shoulder affectionately. "I'll be back." She checked in with that small part of herself where her power rested, like a banked fire waiting to flare. She had started this process from her own house, she could hold it from a few yards away.

She paused with her hand on the door, her head bent as she spoke to Derek and Scott in the room on the other side of the entryway. "I'm not going far. Keep him comfortable." She kept her head down, unable to meet Derek's eyes. Peter was a blight on the Hale family, but he was family, and he was pack, and what she was doing was akin to sawing off one of Derek's limbs with a dull blade.

On the porch, Stiles grabbed her elbow, then looked frantically around, realizing their options were limited for privacy. She gently detached herself from him and said, "Let's take a walk." She slipped her gloves on and stood at the foot of the stairs, waiting for him to follow.

As they walked into the dark wood she slipped her arm around his so that from afar, they looked nothing more than a young couple taking a walk on a frigid moonlit night.

_He walked out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, black hair boyishly stuck to his head in a flat skullcap. Rills of water ran from his shoulders over a smooth and hairless chest to sluice along the ridges and planes of his stomach. Obviously, the towel wound around his waist was for her benefit more than his, since he was a firm believer in the air dry method. In a moment of rare playfulness, he shook his head out like a dog after a bath and grinned at her. Lydia tossed her copy of Scientific American aside and chewed her lower lip. He looked unnaturally young, and certainly a little less burdened with his hair sticking out at odd angles and with a bit of humor lighting his eyes._

"_Oooh," she purred in appreciation, "Freshly laundered werewolf." She sauntered over to him, putting an extra little twitch in her hips to let him know she meant business before she hooked a finger in his towel and tugged suggestively. "I like."_

_He smiled, a gentle curl of the left side of his mouth, a relaxing of his brows. If he were a dog he might even be wagging a little bit. She had come to realize a while ago that Derek rarely smiled, he just seemed to scowl less._

_He caught her hand, held it a moment. "We just did this in January, you don't have to do it again."_

_She pouted, let go of the towel and back pedaled toward the bed. "Tired of me already?"_

_Derek stood his ground, even as she stretched out like a cat on his bed._

"_I appreciate you doing...what you do, but you can always say no." He dipped his head and looked at her from under heavy eyebrows, his mossy eyes furrowing in concern. "I think I can handle a little snake on my own, if I have to."_

_Lydia snapped out of her playful demeanor as though someone had thrown a switch. "A ten foot Lamia is hardly a 'little snake'."_

"_Wolves kill snakes in the wild all the time."_

"_They don't kill ten foot long snakes that transform into beautiful women, have sex with your co Alpha, shoot flesh eating venom at you and then try to devour small dogs and random children when left unsupervised." She paused and thought a moment, swayed her head a little side to side, "If it helps, consider this a personal favor for Allison. She's feeling a little bitter about that." _

_Derek shrugged, an elegant tensing of the shoulders before rolling his head on his neck, shaking off the tension._

"_Then tell me," he approached her, sat on the edge of the bed but still didn't touch her. "What do you see? If you and I do nothing and I fight this on my own, what happens."_

_Lydia closed her eyes and shuddered. When she opened them again, they looked opaque and unfocused as she stared out the picture window, looking beyond reality into possibility._

_Her hand reached out blindly and she turned with it like a dancer arching her arm in a graceful port de bras to gently touch his face, tracing marks and wounds only she could see. She rose to her knees and leaned forward, her other hand hovering over the skin on his chest, a butterfly uncertain where to land._

"_You're so open," she whispered. "So much skin, so much, so much so much gone." Her words tumbled out on top of each other until she sucked in a shuddering breath and her light fingers stilled. "You're face." Her own face wrinkled up, lips and nose compressing on each other as she fought tears. "Your beautiful face." Her voice trailed off. _

_Derek caught her hand, turned his face into the scent of her. "But can I win?"_

_Lydia didn't catch the scent of death, but she could smell the carnage. There was the taste of blood on her tongue and in the air an acrid biting poison she fought hard to breathe against. Her vision was like an over developed image superimposed on a normal photograph. And in her vision Derek's eye hung milky white and blind, the skin of his face like melted candle wax. The rest of him lay flayed open and oozing black ichor and yellow venom. More than the savage ruin of his face, or the wet flaps of his skin hanging like obscene garments, was the desiccated remains of his spirit. His body would survive, but the spark of 'him' would be gone._

"_You can win, and then leave the pack open like a wound, waiting for disease to fester." She blinked, her Vision dimming like a fade to black. "Peter is a disease."_

_Lydia shook herself, swiped angrily at the tears on her face. "I remember you being better at foreplay than this," she said, laughing nervously and using her ring finger to swipe delicately at the mascara under her eye._

_Derek looked worried. Not about the beast lurking somewhere in Beacon Hills, probably in the bed of one of his wolves even, but about the woman in front of him who looked as fragile as glass but wore a facade as hard as diamonds._

"_Tell me no, Lydia, and you can walk out that door and I will do whatever I have to on my own."_

_Lydia shook her head at him, letting the Morrigan stretch inside of her. "Shut up and kiss me."_

_He only hesitated a moment more before seizing her shoulders and pressing his mouth with startling familiarity to her own. Sometimes she felt like he took notes after their encounters. He managed to hit all the high points in one quick warning shot over her bow, sliding his tongue between her lips smooth and gracefully to flick against hers with a skill that surpassed mere seduction. Her hands cupped his face, pulling back to give him a wan smile when she felt his smooth cheeks. She inspected the skin unmarred by his usual scruff. "Did you shave? For me?"_

_He shrugged, an elegant lift of his shoulder, almost embarrassed. "You got whisker burn last time..." She backed up on the bed to make room for him, her upper lip tucked over her lower like she was secretly pleased._


	3. Part 3

Part 3

She could feel the tension vibrating through Stiles' lean frame like a bow string pulled too tight. She expected him to snap at any moment. Once or twice he turned to say something, flapped his mouth like a fish gasping for air, then turned and kept walking.

They could barely see the lights of the house in the distance when he finally turned on her, waving his arms wildly like they could communicate all his distress without any words to go with them. She waited patiently. Years of dealing with Stiles had taught her that often communication for him was like predicting death for her; all the possibilities stretched before him and sometimes it took a moment to grasp the right one.

"What the fuck, Lydia?" The words erupted out of him as he turned his back on her, falling into habit to collect himself as his hands stopped waving and rested one on the butt of his gun and the other on his belt buckle. "Just, what the fuck? What can I even say that won't get you killed?" He glanced nervously toward the Hale house, circling, like the packs were already crashing through the brush towards them.

She waited in silence. He didn't want the answer, not really. Or more accurately, he already had the answer and wanted a different one.

"Is this some kind of-" he struggled for another word to complete the sentence, his hands gripping the crown of his head before thrusting aimlessly into the night sky. "I don't even _know_ what this could possibly be, just make it stop!" He stomped in a small circle, kicking viciously at the sticks and tree roots that got in his way before he stopped and rested his hands on his hips in an effort contain himself. "Are we just trying some new freaky power on for size?" He waved his hands in the air like a Hollywood voodoo priest. He wanted this to something simple and frivolous, something easily fixed, and she couldn't give that to him.

"I—just-," He sighed, exhausted with the possibilities. "Lydia, you're killing him. You are, right? You're responsible for _that_." He pointed at the house as his voice cracked.

She didn't deny it, didn't acknowledge it, just waited.

His voice was a tremulous whisper as he took her face in his hands. She looked in his wounded eyes as each random puzzle piece clicked into place. Even if Stiles had been given no other gifts, he had always been adept at finding patterns in the chaos. "You're not a killer Lydia. You're not. Fix it." He pleaded with her not because he cared about Peter Hale, but because he cared what Peter's death would turn her into.

Lydia reached up and pressed her hands over his, holding them to her face. She wanted to be that girl. The one who was a little too smart for her own good and a little bit shallow and and a little bit easy. A little more human. She wanted to be worthy of Stiles love without hurting him, but they were beyond that now. They had been beyond that since Peter's attack. She closed her eyes, felt the power, Peter's stolen power, trickling back to her. She felt Stiles energy like an eye in a storm giving her clarity. It was restful, the only power that wanted nothing more from her than what she was willing to give, even when sometimes she tried to take more than was her due.

She rested for a moment, bathed in the peace. "You don't know what I am," she said, "Not really."

_Derek was propped on an elbow looking down on her, brows furrowed as he traced light strokes on her bare skin. He wasn't a cuddler, but he was a toucher and Lydia was drifting somewhere between afterglow and dream when his hand slipped under her pretty lace top and lightly traced the ridges of her scars. Without moving any other part of her body, she brought her arm up sluggishly and stilled his fingers._

"_I remember," he started, withdrawing his hand and brushing some of the hair back from her face. He stroked through her hair, chewing over his words, "When the Darach tried to kill you and you refused to hide the marks she left on your throat." As though to illustrate he bent and kissed the pulse just under her jaw._

"_You know," she rolled onto her back to look at him, "It's generally bad form to bring up old girl friends in bed."_

_Derek's mouth snapped shut like he had tasted something bad. She watched his eyes flick back and forth over her face, his brow creased in thought. They had been having variations of this conversation for years since she had become the Morrigan. She still didn't have any good answer. It wasn't a conversation about his poor taste in women, but the one about her scars. Perhaps, if she considered the question long enough she thought that it was like an admission of being used, a sexual faux pas like going to one bed with another man's hickey on her._

_She tilted her head and squinted her eyes at him, a shadow of the high school Lydia. "Why do you care so much? Do you have a scar fetish or something?"_

_He very deliberately lifted her hand off her stomach and slid his own along the bare skin just beneath the sheer fabric, his fingers edging back and forth over her skin in a soft rhythm._

"_Werewolves don't scar," he said. "Permanently."_

_She smiled, a sad little lifting of her lips that didn't quite reach her eyes. She passed a hand over his flawless skin from neck to navel. "I noticed." _

"_Some of us have violent lives," his fingers slipped higher up. "And nothing to show for it."_

_He lowered his head, his lips caressing hers. She turned into the kiss, brought her hand up to cup the back of his neck and draw him closer._

"_Why does it matter," she mumbled against his lips. Her tongue skimmed against his as they opened for each other. She rolled toward him, swinging a bare leg over his thigh and grinding toward his rising erection._

"_All our scars are on the inside." He palmed hers, slid a thumb over the ridges of it. "But your scars show how strong you are. How much you've survived." _

_She arched as he rolled on top of her, pressed the tip of himself into her. "You're scars are beautiful, Lydia," he slid his length into her, a long, slow pressing forward until they were joined. "I don't need to see them to know that."_

"_Then why do you want to see them at all," she was breathless already, caught up in the feel of him inside her body, inside her skin. She liked these stolen moments, when they were almost human, when they could enjoy the feel of slipping into each others space without the Wolf or the Morrigan getting in the way. _

"_Because I want YOU to think they're beautiful," he wrapped a leg around her, leaned in close and rolled them so she was suddenly on top._

_She wanted to recoil from the position, slide off and wrap herself in the safety of a body heavy and hard on top of her own. This was exposed. Tender and unprotected. There would be pain, and blood, and power. But Derek took his hands off her, gripped the headboard tight and used his hips alone to ride her rhythm. She traced the lines of his stomach, flat and perfect, the ridges of muscle flexing and bunching with each thrust. She leaned back against his thighs, angling herself for more leverage and watched as he pressed his head back into the pillows, the cords of his neck standing out with the effort of his restraint. _

_One of the straps of her Carine Gilsson top slid off her shoulder, the turquoise silk and lace caught for a moment on a nipple before pooling in a slant across her body. She considered adjusting it before she stopped. He opened his eyes and stared quietly at her. Those muted green eyes, that never missed a thing and revealed nothing in return. He watched her, waiting for direction. She could get up and leave and he wouldn't stop her. He needed her power, but he wouldn't take it. And he thought her scars were beautiful. _

_She carefully slid her other arm free of the strap and held the garment over her breasts, her arms crossed and each hand tucked under her armpits in an incongruous presentation of modesty. _

"_You're beautiful," Derek said, his voice a low murmur. It was as much encouragement as observation._

_So she let the scrap of silk lace drop, let is slide over her skin like a curtain dropping to reveal the last act of magic, the magicians assistant gone, or reappeared, or transformed. It bunched at her waist to display the rips and tears her body had knit back together time and again. The physical evidence of her survival._

_Derek was rarely an open book to her. The years of coming together for these metaphysical booty calls had given them an easiness with each other, a friendship of a sort, even an affection for one another. They understood each other in a way that didn't require words; both called to a power that was a burden and yet defined them. Despite this, they kept their inner most selves wrapped in layers of dysfunction and silence. Derek, especially, had a predatory way of staring the world down before it could ever get close enough to penetrate his thoughts. But as he looked at her now his face smoothed, his eyes...there was something in his eyes that seemed to lighten. She tightened her hands over her breasts, as though it mattered with him still hard inside of her, her skin pale and exposed like a newborn left to the elements._

_The headboard creaked dangerously and he released it before the wood snapped. His hands hovered in the air, uncertain where they should rest. Tentatively, he reached forward and rested them on her thighs. Like a man calming a skittish animal, he slowly slid them up to grip her hips, waiting for her to bolt or accept his touch. There was a tension in every inch of her body, her toes curled tightly enough to make her feet cramp, her eyes like a doe ready to dart back into the underbrush. A laugh, a sigh, a crossed eye would send her reeling away from him. She knew it, and she could tell he knew it too when he just rested his hands on her and waited._

_She closed her eyes, breathed deeply and focused her attention on the sounds of the street below, the light tympani of a leak in the bathroom, the sound of each breath. She felt her feet relax, her legs open and she settled more fully against him. He gripped her thighs gently and pushed upwards with his hips, questing, seeking her approval. She groaned, letting her hands fall to her sides as though a spell had been broken. He thrust again and she ground downward, welcoming him. _

_Lydia leaned into his space, pressing herself nose to nose with him, getting each others scents as though for the first time. She thrust her tongue into his mouth and nicked herself on teeth as his fangs descended. As she tasted her own blood she felt her power stir again, the Morrigan stretching and pulling power to feed to her Alpha. When she drew back, Derek's eyes were Alpha red, and he was fighting to keep his human form._

"_We should stop," he said, his voice thick and rough. It sent shivers through her and she descended on his mouth again, one hand grasping roughly at the short hair at the back of his head. The other cupped his chin so he couldn't turn away from her. _

"_Like hell," she mumbled against his mouth. He growled, letting go of her to rend deep holes in the bed instead. Sliding her eyes to the side, she could see his wolf claws buried in deep furrows in the mattress. Drawing herself away from his mouth she gasped as she felt a frisson of sensation buzz through her scar in response to his beast. She threw herself forward and he met her half way, biting and snapping at each others mouths like they could consume one another from the top down._

_We should be doing this outside, she thought. We should be at the Nemeton, where he can draw more power. She rode him feverishly, her hands clutching at every bare inch of him as though she could find a way to draw more than just his cock inside of her. She wanted more than his skin, more than his flesh and meat and bones. She knew she could have his soul inside her, too, and it was terrifying._

"_We should be at the Nemeton," she said softly. His arms bulged with the effort of holding onto the bed and not her. _

"_Why, so the Lamia can watch?" He rolled his head on his shoulders without breaking their rhythm, tamping down the Alpha power. When he looked at her again, his eyes were two spots of red but his face was human again._

"_So you can draw more power. So the Nemeton can have her sacrifice." Peter taking it from her was a violation, but she would give it to Derek without hesitation._

_Derek's eyes saddened, the light dampening. There was no change to his expression that she could define, no quirk of the eyebrow, no set to his mouth, but she felt a deep sadness radiate from him as his hands came up to cup her face and kiss her tenderly. The Morrigan breathed into him from her, a slow siphoning of energy that seemed to swirl and ripple at her core before rising to meet him. When the orgasm hit her, the rest of the energy poured out of her like a sluice gate had been opened and Derek gasped at the overflow, his own orgasm grabbing him mindlessly in response to hers._

_When the sun rose, Lydia opened her eyes and slid out from underneath Derek's arm, gathered her clothes quietly and got dressed next to the couch. When she sat down to put her shoes on, he opened his eyes and looked at her without moving._

"_I suppose it was pretty stupid trying to sneak out on a wolf," she said, trying to strap on a heel with shaky fingers._

"_You're more powerful than you realize," he said._

"_Yeah, like, wow," she said, abandoning the strap to leave it hanging messily around her ankle. She slid her foot into the other shoe and didn't even bother to try to put it on properly. Anyone walking around this early in the morning was walking the walk of shame anyway, dressed properly or not. "That was pretty incredible last night, huh? It only took us, what," she stood up and looked for her hand bag, "Like, five years to get that right?"_

"_I'm not talking about the sex."_

_She found her handbag, opened it to examine the contents, looked for her phone. "I am."_

"_Lydia," Derek sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and propping his arms on his knees like he was settling in for an earnest discussion._

_Lydia, earnestly, wanted to leave. "Can you call my cellphone please?"_

"_Lydia, please." She ignored him as she thrust his cellphone under his nose. He took the phone, but didn't make any attempt to dial._

"_If I have to do it myself, I will. I can't imagine your password is all that difficult to crack." She ran her hands through her hair in frustration. "Look, it's a long drive back to Berkeley and I have to defend my thesis tomorrow. I don't have time for this."_

_Derek sighed, slid his fingers along the screen until her phone rang from under the couch. She dropped it into her handbag triumphantly, waffled a moment over whether or not to take her magazine with her, then rolled it into a tube and tucked it under her arm._

"_Lydia," Derek blurted, "I know what he did to you." _

_She stopped as an itching, crawling sensation krept with icy fingers up her back. She flipped the hair from her face with the back of her hand, put on her prom queen smile and turned to him. "Of course you do, everyone knows what he did to me. And you even saw the scars last night." Her voice sounded like the same one reserved for small children and imbeciles._

_As an afterthought, she took a compact out of her bag and started to wipe the spent mascara from under her eyes. Grooming was simple, familiar, habit. She was the cat who stops to lick herself after running face first into the storm door._

"_I know what he's done to you since." Derek's voice was weary, tired of one more insult Peter had made on the family name, tired of one more of his friends getting hurt while he was powerless to stop it. "Those scars aren't ten years old. They aren't a one time injury. He's been taking a blood sacrifice every time you give him power."_

_Lydia's lips trembled as she applied lipstick, her face hidden behind her little hand mirror. Inside her mouth she worried at the sore spot made by Derek's fang and flinched as she found its center. The sharp momentary pain whittled away the last of her control and with it the blithe response she had prepared._

"_Do you think I don't know what he's doing?" she asked between clenched teeth. "I'm there, I feel it every time a claw rips into me." She snapped the mirror closed hard enough to crack it. "But I have this power, and you, and him, and Scott, need it. Peter's the fucking cavalry," her foot slid off the impossibly high heel and her face wrinkled at the added insult. "He's the guy who lets you, and Scott, and everyone else go off and live a life and if I say no you have no life to come home to. He's the guy who holds the fort so that you can have honeymoons in France and adventures in South America and find family secrets in Ireland." Derek opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off, her voice rising._

"_He's the one who beats down all the other Alphas when they come looking for me, because they want a little banshee of their very own."_

"_It doesn't work like that," Derek blurted out. "Banshees are aligned with families. You're the Hale banshee. Period."_

"_You tell them that!" She shouted back. "They don't come around when you're here because you and Scott would hand them their asses. But they think I'm open game when you two are gallivanting around." She took the offending shoes off and threw them in frustration at the couch. They hit the leather cushions with a soft thwap thwap like flesh hitting flesh. _

"_And, it's not the banshee they want. They don't want to KNOW when they're going to die, they want to make sure they don't! A great piece of ass is just the gravy on the cake!"_

"_Icing," he corrected her quietly, "Icing on the cake."_

"_Oh. My. God! No wonder Stiles can't have a conversation with me without losing it. Am I this annoying, too? Icing. Gravy. I know the difference. It doesn't fucking matter. Blood. Blood matters." Seemingly spent, she sat down hard on the couch, gathered her shoes and set them neatly side by side on the floor next to her feet. "My blood." She said quietly as she fussed with aligning the shoes perfectly._

"_If I have to pay with a little bit of blood not to be sold piece by piece to the highest bidder for the rest of my unnaturally long life, I don't have much of a choice, do I?" She sighed, looking fruitlessly in her purse for a kleenex until she caught a flash of white in the corner of her eye. Derek handed her a roll of toilet paper with a sheepish shrug. _

"_What is it about men that they don't believe in buying actual tissues?" she asked, taking it from him._

_He sat down next to her. At some point he had put on jeans and she stared at his bare feet for what seemed an unnaturally long time before either of them spoke._

"_I'm sorry, I've been selfish," he said, "I thought," he paused to collect his thoughts, to choose his words carefully. "I thought I could be a different kind of Alpha because we're a different kind of pack. Two packs have never lived together in the same territory before, not, not amicably. And I thought we were all safe so long as there is always a Hale in Hale territory. I didn't stop to consider the price you were paying."_

"_You do realize you just referenced your uncle, and safety in the same sentence," Lydia was preening again. "The two concepts are mutually exclusive."_

"_Does he even tell you why?"_

"_I know the Nemeton doesn't recognize him as the true Hale Alpha, that there needs to be balance for the amount of power I have to transfer to him. If I'm taking that much from her, she needs something back." She dabbed at her nose, embarrassed that tears still came to her as easily now as when she had been in her teens._

"_What you don't know," he said, putting his hand lightly on her leg, "Is how much power YOU actually have. When you figure that out, he won't be able to take anything from you anymore."_

_Lydia shrugged. It all seemed hopeless and irrelevant right now. "You have a dragon to slay."_

"_A Lamia." he corrected._

"_Whatever. Scales, tail, might as well breathe fire...dragon. And she's leaving Isaac's now." Lydia looked faraway again, her Spidey sense for evil kicking in as the Lamia shed her human form and slithered into the day. "You should probably go before Cora catches wind of who that thing kept warm with last night. She might be an Alpha of her own pack now, but she still makes some of those exceptional Hale family decisions. She'll probably try to eat it's liver and get herself killed." Derek paused, uncertain whether he should just abandon a weeping woman in his apartment. Lydia blew her nose with dainty little puffs into the toilet paper. "Seriously, I'm not sleeping with your sister, Derek. You need to go."_

_He stood up, gathered his clothes but still looked uncertain as she set herself to rights._

"_Go!" she said, standing up and pushing at him. "That was some really great sex last night...don't waste it!"_

Stiles looked just...tragic. Lost. She knew Stiles spastic and angry. She even knew how to handle him when he was all barely controlled rage or full of bone tired exhaustion. She had even discovered she could use some of her power to bolster his. Not as much as the wolves, of course, or she could burn him up from the inside out, but enough to make the difference between collapsing where he stood and getting him home to a warm bed. But Stiles lost and alone was enough to break even her banshee heart.

Lydia hadn't seen him look quite this distraught since the night the Nemeton had come back to life. Not since he had felt so lost and powerless to protect what he loved that he was willing to sacrifice himself. That had been a hundred lifetimes ago, it seemed.

"What do you mean I don't know what you are? It doesn't matter _what _you are, you're Lydia. Lydia Martin. Lydia Martin isn't a killer." He stumbled backward, sat down heavily on a rock, looked at her with eyes that were wounded and aged and weary with the weight of everything he didn't want to know.

She knelt in front of him, took off her gloves and cupped his face, drawing him down to her like she had that first time on the floor of the boys locker room when they were sixteen. Breathed in his scent of cheap soap and good cologne, and felt him relax against her.

"Don't tell me you don't want him dead, too" she said as he sagged against her shoulder. He rolled his head side to side.

"But I wouldn't kill him. Just, just don't give him a power boost anymore, Lyd, he'll do it on his own. He's been set to self destruct for years." She cradled him against her shoulder like a mother soothing a child, her fingers running lightly through the close cropped hair at the back of his neck.

"You don't understand, Stiles," she whispered. "All I'm doing is taking back what's mine."

_He was behind her, which was not a position she was generally comfortable being in with Peter Hale. She didn't trust him standing behind her at the grocery store let alone naked and bent over a magical tree stump in the middle of a sacred grove. But she had a theory that the Nemeton hated him as much as she did regardless of the opinion of the Morrigan, who seemed to think one metaphysical lay was as good as the next. So bent over and bracing herself was the only way to work sex magic on a slab of wood that would otherwise exact it's own price in splinters along Lydia's backside._

_The cool mists of a spring morning rose around them as her high pitched groans echoed through the trees to harmonize with his own wolfish grunts. Somewhere a crow called out in disgust, her own cries answering in kind. The lichen clinging to the stump colored her skin with flecks of green as it cushioned each thrust forward, Peter driving hard and deep emboldened by the rising power of the Morrigan. She had been right. Sex in the woods was powerful, but sex on the Nemeton herself was like the difference between switching on a light bulb and lighting up the power grid on the Eastern seaboard. _

_She felt the orgasm building in her, tried to relax to buy herself time before the wave crested and brought with it the inevitable pain but he leaned over her, one had resting on the tree for the leverage and the other gripping her hip to pull her against him with every thrust. _

"_Come for me, little witch," he growled in her ear. He sounded rough and wolfish and angry. She supposed without her eyes on him he had dropped the charade of trying to appear human and sprouted fangs, his eyes sliding from blue to deep crimson red. His fingers would have transformed into claws by now in anticipation of the blood letting. She wondered, even as her body clutched at his cock against her will, how she could still betray herself and associate this act with any kind of pleasure. Sex with Peter always ended one way. Bloody._

_His hand slipped between her and the tree, sliding lightly against her swollen clitoris even as she was already falling over the edge on her own. Her knees buckled but Peter was prepared. He slid his arm around her waist to support her tightly against him, thrusting harder with each cresting wave of her orgasm. She was like a doll as he held her, seemingly weightless, against him. He changed his angle inside of her and brought another surge on top of the one already ebbing away, her long low groan changing to a high, piercing keen. When the claws buried themselves in her side her shriek of pain was lost in the sounds of her orgasm. _

_Her voice winged out into the forest as her blood flowed onto the stump of the Nemeton. She gasped for air as she pulled the power from the Nemeton, pulled the energy her blood had excited out of the sacred space and gathered it to her like a drowning woman gasped at air before going under again. She took more and more, mouthfuls and lungfuls until it filled her to bursting, until even his cock stretching the space inside her was taking up precious room she wanted to fill with energy. As her climax waned to the last faint flutters she felt his building and as he crested on the trough of her own with a hard thrust and a deep animal grunt, she shoved everything she had collected into him all at once. She thrust it away from herself like a knife, a spear, a weapon she used to skewer and smother him. And secretly, she smiled when he cried out with the pain of it _

"I don't know why it didn't work," Lydia said as she wandered idly through the Sheriff's office and flipped through the flotsam and jetsam on the shelves.

Stiles didn't look up from his paperwork, just flipped a page back and forth in a plain folder. "You gave the guy a mega power boost and you wonder why he didn't keel over. I'm shocked." He jotted a note, flipped to a new page.

"It should have incinerated every ounce of power in him. Burnt every synapse in that batshit little brain of his. Done SOMETHING." She huffed and pouted. Stiles sighed and flipped to the next page.

"Just, be careful, Lydia," he said, making another note before scratching behind his ear with the pen. "You might kill him like that, not just neuter him. Although," this time he did look up at her, his lips quirked in a smile, "I'm all for neutering him."

"I bet you are," she said under her breath, "But not half as much as I am."

"I can tell you why it didn't work." He sat back in the chair, stretched his arms wide before rubbing absentmindedly at the small scar in his hairline with one hand and picking up another file with the other.

Lydia perked up, looked at him expectantly as she twirled a rack of rubber stamps with one French manicured nail.

"He's a cockroach. Those bastards can last through a nuclear strike." He tossed the folder aside and picked up another one.

"But," he said, opening it and making another mark, "On behalf of animal control I can thank you for the fifty six freaking canine carcasses that have to be disposed of." He waved a file at her, "And the paperwork that goes along with disposing of that many dogs. What is truly confusing to Officer Janover, however," he waved a picture at her, "Is how a whole pack of a rare breed of Egyptian dog, so rare in fact that they should be extinct, could get into the county completely unseen before turning on each other for no apparent reason. And I," he sighed this time and ran his hands roughly through his close cropped hair, "I can't explain to him that a freaking Alpha wolf told them to. Told them. Politely asked, even."

"They're called Wepwawet," she said. Stiles blinked at her, completely unable to cope with a rational response.

After a moment of blank disbelief he exploded, surging out of his chair and accidentally knocking a light over. "I know what they're called! I'm a fucking Druid! I graduated at the top of my Druid class...or I would have if any of us knew who the others were." He stared at her with the face that said 'are you for real' before mumbling, "That's one of the unfortunate drawbacks to being part of a secret society!"

He picked up the picture again and waved it at her. "I know what a fucking Wepwawet is!" This time she could see dozens of greyhound like bodies piled one on another. She was glad the photo was in black and white. "What I don't understand is why there were FIFTY SIX of them. They travel alone. They're the forward guard. The scouts. You don't get a whole platoon of recon guys, usually." He paused and took a breath, picked up the lamp and put it back on the desk. "It kind of ruins the element of surprise, yknow?"

"I think they were drawn to the Nemeton," she said quietly.

"Everything is drawn to the Nemeton," Stiles agreed, organizing his folders and looking for his pen, his temper tantrum spent. "Any creepy ass thing that Creation thought was a good idea to crap out into the world eventually winds up in our backyard." He narrowed his eyes at her.

"Wait a minute." He put both hands flat on the desk and scrutinized her. Lydia looked around, like there could be anyone else in the Sheriff's office at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday night. She felt like a bug under glass as she tried to smile sweetly and return his stare without flinching.

"You supercharge Chester the Molester there and suddenly we have Wile E Coyote cannibalizing each other in unheard of numbers."

"They're more like jackals than coyotes," she said, then jumped when he slammed his hands on the desk.

"Quit fucking around, Lydia. I don't know what you did, or were trying to do, but don't do it again."

Lydia looked scared for a moment. "Tell me he can't hurt Derek. Tell me this will burn itself out like every other time I've juiced him up."

"Probably?" Stiles shrugged. "I'll ask Deaton. Or you should ask Deaton. I'm not supposed to care about Derek's pack. It's a conflict of interest." He waved his hand like it really didn't make much of a difference.

"You should care," Lydia said, losing her 'pretty but harmless' facade in an instant, "Because if Derek goes down, Scott will be next."

"If you're worried about who's going down, start with yourself and do a little less of it." Stiles snapped. His face softened when she stumbled back in surprise. "Lyd, I'm sorry. I-" he reached for her but she was already out of the office, rounding the counter, pushing the door open and slipping into the night.


	4. Chapter 4

She had learned to name all the moons like some sort of grisly catechism. That had been April. The Pink Moon. By the Milk Moon in May, her flower boxes and wide beds started budding and by June, the Strawberry Moon, they were in full bloom. She sipped her tea on her patio and absently fingered the purple petals like caressing the garments of an old and familiar friend. She considered going to Paris for the spring, but there was an ache in her, an urgency that she channeled into work.

She was still hurting. The wound Peter had left on her at the Nemeton had healed remarkably quickly, but Stiles had cut her deeper with his words. He had been a constant in this never ending free for all and for the first time since the flood lights had blinded her on that empty lacrosse pitch that she had christened with her blood, she felt alone.

She was barely sixteen again, taped to a chair and being garrotted by her English teacher and feeling the first trickle of power, feeling it for the first time with the knowing it was something 'other' than her. It was something foreign and yet still a part of her, like waking up one morning and realizing puberty had struck with breasts and hair and an extra inch of height. Only this had a harder learning curve than a training bra and starter heels.

She was being garrotted by her English teacher who was lecturing her on the meaning of sacrifice. Despite her terror and confusion and her connection to something she barely understood and couldn't control, the one thing she could sort out of the chaos was that her friends were coming to rescue her. Even if they hadn't, she would have died knowing she wasn't alone. She would have died knowing they were defending her just as fearlessly as they defended each other.

By twenty eight, she had finally learned what Ms. Blake had been trying to teach her. Had learned it so well, in fact, she could have added another PhD. to her name. Her friends would defend her to the death, but could not save her from herself. She would have to give something up for the greater good. For their greater good and her own. It was a bleak realization as she sat in the summer sun, surrounded by the constancy of theorems and equations, and slowly slid her finger over the ignore button on her phone.

Lydia had that shaky, not quite real feeling she always experienced when she worked. The physical world stopped existing for her as she let her mind slip into that place between what was real and what was possible. Papers piled around her weighted down against the summer breezes with stones from her garden, her coffee cup, a tree branch. Her patio table had become an altar to nature and paper as she unlocked the secrets to the universe.

She felt him before she heard him. It was a low rumble in the periphery of her attention. The crunch of gravel under the tires of the patrol car an insult to a peace otherwise punctuated only by the dim hum of summer.

She put her pencil down, shook out her hands and tried to acclimate to the feel of reality again. She was still trying to shake off the buzz when he got out of the car and stood there, watching her with his hands clasped on the roof and a grim set to his mouth. Without saying anything he turned his head away and squinted into the sun. She waited.

"Doc Martin," he said in a long, drawn out way reminiscent of Westerns and good ol' boys.

"Officer," she answered. "Is there a problem?"

"Deputy," he said, looking at her and tapping his badge, "Deputy. And as I'm pretty sure I would know if you were dead or something, as we're pretty much joined a the metaphysical hip, I'm assuming you've broken all of your fingers, since you haven't picked up the phone in," he glanced at his watch, "about two months."

She smiled. He hadn't called her 'Doc' in years. He was trying to mend fences. She always called him Officer, he always corrected her. It was familiar and ordinary and it ached because it shouldn't be this easy anymore.

She waggled her fingers at him, and as an afterthought picked up her foot from where it rested on the garden chair in front her to wiggle her well manicured toes. "Ten and ten," she said.

He sighed and looked at the ground. Scuffed the dirt with his toe. Looked back at her. She could imagine hearing him count to ten.

"Then why aren't you answering the phone, Lydia." He sounded tired, a tone that was just two ticks shy of exasperated. She was used to exasperating him. Exhausting him was something new.

"I was working." She indicated the table strewn with notes only she could make sense of.

"You don't completely check out when you work. I mean, you do," he walked around the car and leaned back on the hood, arms crossed, "but you usually come up for air more than once every sixty days."

She squinted her eyes at him, smiled in spite of herself. "You've been counting, haven't you?"

"Sixty eight days, ten hours, and," he looked at his watch again, "forty three minutes."

"You're wasting your time in the police department," she answered. This was warm, comfortable, navigating the prickly barbs of friendship. She could do this. She could do this forever and she would only have to pay for it with her body and a little bit of her soul.

"Yeah, well, somebody's got to hide the bodies, right?" He looked at the ground again, uncomfortable. "I was worried about you, Doc. And," he pushed off the car, then leaned back again, crossed and uncrossed his feet at the ankles as he tried to look casual and failed. "And I'm sorry."

She should have left it at that. Told him apology accepted and sent him on his way, but almost of their own volition her legs withdrew from the chair and she patted the seat, inviting him into her space. ...Said the spider to the fly.

He gazed at her a moment too long, turned away and kind of flailed a hand in her direction. "You should probably put some clothes on first."

She looked down at her robe. Sitting in her own yard in the middle of nowhere she hadn't bothered to get dressed this morning. She quirked her mouth to the side. "Oh, I suppose so." Tightening the sash around her she stood up and motioned that he should follow her into the house.

"You don't even know what's going on, do you?" he said as the screen door banged shut behind him.

"Nothing new. I would have felt it," Lydia bent to scratch a Siamese cat between the ears when it sauntered out to great her.

The cat closed her eyes in apparent bliss before squinting at Stiles as if to say, "You again."

"No, you would have felt a disturbance in the Force if there was something foreign in our territory. What we have going on is more like bipartisan leadership." He tried to pet the cat, but she swished her tail at him and walked in the other direction.

Lydia stopped. Peter.

"He's causing trouble, isn't he?" She asked.

Stiles frowned, head bobbing back and forth on his neck like a rooster for a couple beats as he looked for the right explanation. "Trouble is what you would call running out of gas on a deserted road in the middle of a snow storm. Trouble is more like, say, losing your cellphone with nude selfies on it. Trouble might even be what you're in when you say something really obnoxious to your best friend." He winked at her. "What we're talking here is more like," he paused, struggling to find the right analogy, "a fucking Death Star landing in your backyard." He stalked into the kitchen and opened her fridge. "A big fucking Death Star on steroids. Yeah, that kind of trouble." He looked at her in disbelief. "All you have are wine coolers in here."

"Aren't you on the job?"

"I'm always on the job," he groused. He snatched a water instead and chugged it. "Scott has me multitasking more than the Titan supercomputer."

He took another long draw from the bottle, the plastic crackling in the quiet air as it collapsed, his eyes watching her over the rim. The sound skidded painfully along her already frayed nerves.

"So, since Thing 1 and Thing 2 can't play nice, and Thing 3," he motioned at her with the nearly empty bottle, "can't pick up the phone, I have been sent by _my_ Alpha," he used the water bottle to make a circle over his head, as though to indicate an omnipotent Alpha presence, "to see if you can," now he looked down, uncomfortable again. "If you can help sort this thing out."

"There's a reason I haven't answered my phone, Stiles." She said it slowly and carefully. Something was starting to stir in her, an awareness, a pressure slowly building towards detonation.

He continued to watch her over the lip of the nearly empty water bottle, his gaze a heavy weight that made her pull the neck of her robe closed and tug the hem lower around her thighs. He put it down on the counter and turned to get another from the fridge. He got through half of that one before he spoke again. "If you had answered your phone, you would know what's going on. Derek's pack is leaving, Lydia."

She tasted the adrenaline rush, a hot copper rush along her tongue, like blood. And the Morrigan started to rouse.

Stiles didn't notice, going back to the fridge and foraging, speaking to her with his back turned. "Well, they're not really 'leaving' him, he's sending them to Cora, for their own protection. But, it's weakening him, so," he tried to speak to her over his shoulder, but his voice echoed off the hollow valleys of cold bottles and root vegetables, his effort at nonchalance failed again. He straightened, leaned against the counter like he had his patrol car and cracked the lid on another bottle. "Put on something nice, because you've got a date tonight." He raised the water in mock toast before putting it to his lips.

She flinched like he had hit her. She knew he wasn't trying to be mean spirited, even as he grimaced at his own words, his whole face wrinkling from forehead to lips. She could see how unhappy he was, and knew how dire the situation would have to be for him to be on her doorstep delivering a message for the Hales. First, he was the McCall Emissary. This should have been Deaton's job if it was anyone's. But they all knew that if she was being as intractable as she was, she would have gone in the house, locked the door, and left him to return to his pack with bad news. Second, he was Stiles. He had made it clear years ago he would help her pick up the pieces of her life, but he wouldn't help break her. Her attempt to overpower Peter had created an immeasurable shift in balance if Stiles had shown up on her doorstep to push her into Derek's bed.

The war on his face was brief and futile as he gave in to his anger, the only real defense he had against her. He snapped, "Look, I'm not your pimp. Just, answer your damn phone. There's shit going on that we all have to deal with, even you." He stopped and lowered his voice. "Especially you, since you created our current funhouse freak show."

Stiles' contempt was like a worm that burrowed into her, writhing just under her skin until she wanted to scream with the ache of it. She wanted claws and teeth so she could hunt something, rend flesh and bone and shake off this feeling that was slithering into her limbs, flowing into the spaces of her mind where she had been at peace with her work not an hour ago. She wanted to run feral and naked in the woods, mate savagely under the moon with her face turned toward the sky and her limbs cool in the dust of her ancestors. Maybe Stiles saw it, too, because he took a step back and put his hand on his gun.

She ached from a hole deep inside herself. Lydia knew these couldn't possibly be her thoughts, but she could feel the skin ripping under her fingertips, the deep wet ache of hard sex, and the loamy feel of the warm earth under her back. Sometimes it was so hard to find herself buried beneath the Nemeton and the Morrigan. She was a small voice in a deep, wide hole they both seemed to be burying under sex and pain. It was death by inches, and Stiles hurt her even when he didn't mean to.

Against all better judgment, and none of it her own, she padded on light feet towards him. He moved away from her until he was hemmed in by the L of the counter top on one side and the sink on the other. She shouldn't be doing this, she thought, pressing herself along the tall length of him. They had agreed years ago this was a bad idea. Something else in her disagreed.

"Uh, Lydia," he looked frantically side to side, "what are you doing?"

"Doesn't it bother you," she crooned, as she canted her head and slid her hand along the back of his neck to pull him towards her, "to be the wolves errand boy when you could have all my power for yourself?"

She pressed her lips to his, a long, slow, lingering kiss. He tasted like cold, clear water as he stood a moment, unresponsive, before letting the water bottle clatter and bounce to the floor and holding her tightly to him. Kissing him was like kissing that sixteen year old boy again, and for a moment she could pretend she was somebody different, something simpler. Until the Morrigan reared up inside of her and the thought drifted away like a dream.

His hands slid into her hair, tangled in it as his tongue found hers and struggled for dominance. She hummed in delight.

"I don't want your power," he rumbled against her mouth, his hands sliding down the thin fabric of her robe to grab her by the hips, "I just want you." He picked her up and pivoted, setting her on the counter top and bracketing her with his arms on either side of her head.

She explored the inside of his mouth, ravenous, as her hands fought with the buckle on his gun belt. Thwarted, the Morrigan would have ripped it off him if he hadn't dipped his hands between their bodies to make short work of it. His knuckles grazed her slick center as he released the buckle and she sucked a quick breath in, pulling the air from him. He chuckled at the unusual sensation of his air being stolen from him as she heard the heavy thud of the belt and everything attached to it land in the sink.

The more mundane belt she could manage, and it clinked and clattered as her small hands worked blindly on slipping the leather from the buckle to hang open loosely against his pants.

He paused as she popped the button open on his pants, even as his hands gripped the counter tops until his knuckles were white. "What are we doing, Lydia? We agreed a long time ago this was a bad idea."

"We were young and stupid," she said, the soft _vrppp_ of the zipper punctuating her words.

"So now we're what? Old and stupid?" He shuddered as she reached into his underwear to caress him with soft fingers. He was long and hard, the tip of him already peeking out from the waistband of his briefs.

"Tell me you want me to stop," she said, flicking her tongue out to graze his lips. Inside, Lydia was already screaming "_STOP_", but she wasn't in control anymore. She could feel the power spindling around her, and knew the Morrigan served one purpose. To share power. But Stiles was human. Stiles was _human_. Her power to him would be like surfing the currents of the sun.

He groaned as she gripped him harder, her thumb slipping across the head in little circles. He shook his head. "No, no I don't want to stop. God, Lydia," he rested his head against her shoulder, his voice husky and cracked, "don't stop."

She wrapped her legs around him. "Tell me we should stop and you can walk out that door right now." The Morrigan was a magpie and Lydia snarled. This wasn't a choice. But Stiles was so lost in the sensation he didn't even see the brief struggle that flickered across her face before she pulled herself forward on the counter and angled herself toward his length.

He stopped her with a hand on her thigh, his thumb sliding into the thick russet curls at her center to whirl little figure eights inside the pink folds. She was wet and hungry for him and gripped him angrily with her legs, trying to pull him into her.

He stayed her with a gentle hand. "Give me a minute. I've dreamt about this every fucking night for years. It's not going to be a quickie."

Lydia sighed. This is what she wanted. Derek was a capable lover, and over the years they had developed an affection for each other, but she knew if it weren't for the Morrigan, neither would warm the other's bed on their own. And Peter was...Peter. He was a grudge fuck she couldn't shake. Her own personal snake in the grass. But Stiles was the lover she was meant to have, when she had learned to find peace with herself.

His long, elegant fingers circled and probed while he never took his eyes off her face. She could see him memorizing ever twitch and sigh, to put up like one of his little glass jars full of magic and lore. And then the pad of his thumb brushed her at just the right angle with the right pressure and the orgasm caught her without any warning. She gasped and clutched his shoulders and he shoved into her, thrusting deep and sighing loudly against her neck.

When the energy hit him, he looked shocked. He pulled out and stumbled back, taking a moment to right his pants before she hopped off the counter in pursuit, holding his mouth to hers and breathing the rest of the power into him, even as she frantically sought to take it back. She could ignite that spark of magic in him, she could fan it until it was an inferno. She could kill him with it.

Lydia screamed, a long keening wail that would bring safety and protection. Only this time she needed it from herself, not for herself. Her cat, who had discreetly turned her back on the activities in her kitchen hissed and shot from the room. Stiles lay on the floor turning a clay color as the breath caught in his chest. She considered running to his car to find his asthma inhaler, even as she knew he hadn't needed it in years.

His brown eyes shined feverishly as he clutched at her with one hand and his chest with the other. His skin felt dry and hot to the touch.

"Oh my god oh my god ohmygod," she cried. "Please please please breathe. I'm so sorry." She cupped his face in her hands, watching the light in his eyes peak and start to wane.

Not knowing what else to do, she kissed him again, and tasted her own power. Unable to hold it all, like an overfilled cup it leaked off him. She knew the feel of it, closed her eyes and imagined it coming back to her. Like reversing the flow of an electric current she pulled it back into herself, breathed it in like she had accidentally sucked the air from his lungs a few minutes before. Slowly, she felt his skin cool under her touch, the light in his eyes dim to something glassy and human again.

Outside her screen door, she saw Peter and Derek standing like bookends just at the border of her field of flowers.

Stiles had pushed himself into a sitting position in her hallway, gasping for air, but breathing.

"What the fuck was that," he finally managed to whisper. He was shaking and sweaty, moisture slicking his face in a sickly sheen.

She ignored the question, braced his arm around her neck and leveraged him to his feet. "I think Scott will be here any minute. They'll help you get home, and, and I'll call your dad," she hung her head, wanting to cry. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"Did you just try to kill me?" he asked, his voice cracking at the absurdity of it. She maneuvered him through the doorway, bracing her door open with her back.

"Not intentionally. I swear." She led him to the end of her yard, where the flower beds ended and Derek and Peter waited. Her head ached with the overload of her own power, and she needed to get Stiles gone before the Morrigan cooked up some other horrible sexual experience for all of them. Possibly all of them at once.

"What happened," Derek asked, taking Stiles' weight from her. "We heard you scream."

"Now, see," Peter said, taking Stiles other side, "I told you, I know that scream, and it's really nothing to worry about it. If _you _don't know that scream, you're doing something wrong."

Lydia and Derek gave him scathing looks and said "Shut up!". Stiles tried to lift his sagging head and agreed weakly. "Yeah, shut the fuck up." Peter shrugged, indifferent.

"I," she didn't know how to explain this, "I didn't mean to." She was mortified at her own lack of control, and confused at what in Stiles could have put him on the Morrigan's radar. She wanted to crawl into bed for a week and stay there, drifting through plenary equations and surfing algorithms.

Derek looked sad, and a little worn. Lydia noticed the ragged edge of a wound peeking out of the collar of his shirt, and he was careful to take Stiles on the opposite side. Peter looked blandly amused as he adjusted Stiles' weight around his own shoulders. He breathed deeply and cocked his head at her, his mouth pulling into a lopsided grin as he took in her gaping robe and the unmistakable scent of sex and magic in the air.

"So, will you be stopping by the house later or will you two be skulking off to that loft of his," he said with a mocking interest. "After you and my nephew spend some quality time together, he and I have a little family discussion to finish."

She had stomped half way back to her house before she realized the gravel was biting into her feet and she hadn't righted her robe yet. She tightened the sash hard enough to leave a friction burn across her middle, and then because it was the only thing she could think of to do, she turned and flipped Peter off.

"Well," Peter said, unconcerned by the turn of events, and leaning across Stiles to talk directly to Derek, "I see you're getting sloppy seconds tonight."

It had taken the lion share of the summer for Peter's power to burn itself out like a star collapsing. It made him insufferable on the best of days and downright unbearable on the worst. The betas in the pack made themselves scarce, the omegas made themselves invisible. Many of them went to live temporarily with Cora's pack in Michigan. It was especially hard for Isaac, who enjoyed Cora's attention when she visited her brother, but had to accept that an Alpha couldn't have an omega mate in her own pack. And it made Derek slip into Lydia's bed more and more often on the pretext of drawing enough energy to evenly match Peter.

Stiles finally stopped leaving weekly messages for her, messages she never returned. And as the heat of summer slipped into the cool torpor of fall, she woke on the night of the Harvest moon with the taste of blood on her tongue and visions of death in her eyes.

Fendi slid out from under the bed, regarded her with wary eyes before hurrying from the room in the disinterested way only a cat can.

"Coward," Lydia said as her feet shakily found the floor, her hand fumbling for her phone on the bedside table. She stopped, took a deep breath, and flexed her fingers before trying to pick it up again. This time her fingers connected with the cool square of her cellphone and she quickly scrolled through her contacts to press Derek's number with a trembling finger.

His voice mail message had never been personalized so she left a message with the automated voice that informed her she had, in fact, reached the number she was calling.

She dialed Scott and got a message that greeted her with a cheery "You've reached Scott McCall. If you're friends and family, you know what to do. If you're trying to reach the McCall Sports Medicine Clinic, please call my regular business line during regular business hours. Have a nice day." Lydia left the same message on his voicemail that she had Derek's, then after a moment of hesitation tried Allison's number. She got through the first couple syllables of Allison's voicemail before hanging up without leaving a message. She paused over the last number in her short list of contacts before setting the phone down on the bed and standing up. Even if he could forgive her for nearly killing him, she hadn't forgiven herself. She did a couple yoga stretches to shake off the last of the dream before padding her way into the bathroom for a drink.

The cat thudded and mewed from somewhere near the living room and Lydia swallowed quickly to yell "Stay off the counters, Fendi!"

She looked in the mirror. She hadn't gotten nearly enough sleep, her eyes puffy and rimmed with blue. The dream had been bloody and frightening. And carnal. Fully awake now she realized she ached all over, like she had gone six rounds in Derek's bed, but without the satisfaction. Something horrible was coming to visit the Nemeton and the boys needed to know about it. The Morrigan rolled over with interest as Lydia thought of Derek, like a dog being offered a bone. Maybe she should take a shower and drive over there if he wasn't going to answer his phone. She looked at the clock. 2:06. She grimaced. She could get out the door by 2:30. Be at Derek's by 2:45. Be on a flight to Milan to update her winter wardrobe by 9 am. Whatever this thing was, she didn't want to be around for it. She turned toward the linen closet and screamed.

"Oh for the love of God, Lydia, you'll bring the neighbors," Peter said calmly, reclining in her bedroom doorway, "And after I went through all this trouble to get you alone."


	5. Chapter 5

"_Here's the funny thing, Lydia," he said, carefully opening and closing drawers, assessing her clothes with a frown or a nod of approval, "If you leave a big enough mess, no one wants to come play on your playground anymore. What sort of mess do you think sixty dead wepwawats make?" He gently sorted through her lingerie drawer with a single finger, pulling out and casually appraising each item with a practiced eye. "These past six months have been like a little vacation. And I have you, to thank for that." _

"_Fifty six," she quietly corrected him. He paused with his hand still in a drawer. Looking at her over his shoulder, he had the decency to look sheepish._

"_Well, I was feeling a bit peckish." He held up a delicate cream and beige camisole by Agent Provocateur. "This, this is lovely. I think you should wear this tonight."_

_She felt sick, and it must have shown on her face. He pouted at her. "Now don't be like that. It's not like it's cannibalism or anything. They're a completely different species." _

_Lydia glanced nervously around her room. Her scream should bring Scott, Derek, the whole pack to her aid. Although, honestly, she didn't know what they would do against one of their own in general, and Peter in particular. _

"_I-" she glanced at the door. He tsked at her as he twisted his mouth into an angle of disapproval and raised his eyebrows, like a parent whose child should know better. Her brief thought to run was ill advised, at best. He held the delicate undergarment out to her again. _

"_I don't want to get blood on it," she said._

"_You're right. It's probably one of a kind. A young lady with your sense of taste probably has a whole trousseau set aside for just such an occasion." He dropped the garment back in the drawer it came from and looked at her expectantly. She nodded toward the closet._

"_There's a lingerie chest in there. You, you can pick anything."_

_He smiled indulgently. "Why don't you pick something." He nodded with his head that she should go ahead._

_She flipped on the light with fingers that didn't feel entirely attached, slid open the top drawer of an antique lingerie chest and looked at the rainbow variety of tops from her last trip to London. She didn't want to do this. Something wicked this way came, but Derek was home and would deal with it. Derek had only left Beacon Hills once since his encounter with the Lamia. And then he had gone under duress, and only because it was Cora calling for aid. That was when Lydia had tried to burn the power out of Peter, tried to smother it in him like firefighters sometimes smothered a blaze with a well controlled explosion. Derek had assured her he would do his best to keep Peter on a leash since his worse suspicions were confirmed by seeing her scars. And here she had only made it harder by trying to take matters into her own hands._

_Peter could only be here for one thing now, he didn't make social calls, and certainly not at 2 a.m. None of them came into her house, actually. It was an unspoken rule that of all the demands put on her, the least she deserved was her own space. This was where she lived and worked and could pretend she was human. If anyone had any question about how deeply she coveted her privacy from the weres they could refer to the flower boxes of wolfsbane along her porch and windows, and the beds of it along the perimeter and every walkway. She grew so much of it her little grey house looked like it sat afloat on an ocean of blue and purple._

_Her hands clutched blindly at a garment and she turned back toward the door. Could she hide in the closet all night? How much longer until someone got here? Even if Derek showed up, was he powerful enough to get past her floral landscape? Inside her, the Morrigan sensed the already present power, sensed an Alpha waiting to mate and stirred. Lydia felt the frisson of desire slip like goosebumps over her nipples even as she was repulsed by it. Power was calling to power and she was just along for the ride._

_She saw him moving around her room in the thin light spilling from the closet. He looked up when her shadow obstructed his view of the papers he was flipping through on her desk. A heavy wool skirt and a hunter green sweater draped over his other arm. He held them out to her like a valet._

"_I took the liberty of picking out some clothes for you. It's a little chilly this morning." He nodded with his head toward the papers. "Fascinating work you're doing here. I almost regret not taking the time to get to know your intellect as well as I know the rest of you."_

"_It's an article," she said, as if it mattered. An article for the Royal Society of Science on the effects of Lunar phases on morphic fields. It was her area of specialty._

_He looked at the undergarment in her hand. "Always with the black. It's not like it matters, I suspect you just throw them out when you get home anyway." He waved his arm back and forth, indicating she should take the clothes from him._

_She stood there dumbly, fear and lust making her feel not entirely anchored to the world. She felt insubstantial, as though if she reached for the clothes her hand might pass right through them._

"_How did you get past the wolfsbane," she asked as he walked around the bed to stand right next to her._

"_Really," he scoffed, "It's a deterrent, not a repellent. If you really wanted to keep us out, you should have taken that annoying Druid's suggestion and bought a door made out of Mountain ash. But then," his head nodded back and forth on his shoulders as it did when he was weighing options, "you would have had to do all the window sills and probably some off the roof timbers, too, to keep us all out. Some," he used the hand that wasn't holding her clothes to reach up and cup the side of her face, "of us," he kissed her cheek lightly, "are more powerful than others." _

_She turned to look at him, his blue eyes merry and his lips set in a smug line. She licked her lips. She remembered the one time she had let him kiss her. That first time when she was eighteen. She had liked it in spite of herself. And she remembered his teenage self pressed against her in a hallucination and felt the ache between her legs. The Morrigan was a Siren, a succubus inside of her. _

"_I would dress you myself," he said, "but I know you have body image issues, and I'm trying to be sensitive to that. So why don't you go in the bathroom there for some privacy and I'll wait for you."_

"_Derek will be here soon." She could wrap her legs around him right now, let him press her up against the wall and sheath herself around him. _

"_Doubtful," Peter sighed at the look of fear in her eyes. "I didn't hurt him. Permanently. A little nightshade baked into a blueberry pie...he'll sleep it off. Derek and Scott probably sooner than any of the others. Now Allison," that head bob again, "She might feel a little off, but probably nothing more than a headache, nausea. Really nothing worse than a hangover, I swear." He shrugged like none of it really mattered. "Although, they'll probably reconsider family dinners for a while. It's for the best really. It'll save on a lot of awkward questions later."_

_Her hand reached out to take the clothes. She should have called Stiles. _

"_I can smell it on you," he said, as his fingertips brushed her wrist. "The desire. You smell like sex already and I haven't even touched you."_

"_Is that why you're here? You just want to get laid?" She paused in the doorway of the bathroom. Why was she bothering to get dressed if all he wanted was a piece of ass?_

_He laughed outright. It was a hard, unfamiliar sound. "If that's all I wanted, little witch, there are half a dozen betas who would whine and crawl to me if I just winked at them. And twice as many humans. No, what I need, only you can give me."_

"_You want power." _

"_Isn't that what any of us really want?" He moved into her space again, pressing her into the wall. One hand rested on the door frame next to her head barring escape, the other wound around her body, slipped under her nightgown and found her slick and wet and wanting him._

_As if reading her mind, he said "If all I wanted was sex, I'd seduce you right here." He jerked his head toward the bed. "Or over there. That would be a novelty for us, wouldn't it." He moved his arm and used his body to corral her into the bathroom. "But what I want is what you gave me at the Nemeton. If I could get that without violating your delicate sensibilities, I would. But since I can't...put your clothes on like a good little witch or I swear," his jovial expression fell into something altogether dark and sinister, "I'll drag you there in nothing but bare feet and," he fingered her sleep shirt, "a silk nightgown."_

_It was an uncommon position to be in, she thought as she sat quietly on her bed like a child, fingers laced primly in her lap while Peter knelt in front of her and slipped warm socks on her feet and a pretty pair of boots. The banshee predicted death, evil, and called to the creatures beholden to protect her. Peter didn't intend to do her any physical harm, but it seemed the banshee wasn't calibrated for psychic, emotional, or mental trauma. If she was still breathing at the end of the day, it had done its job. It had called a wolf to her, and that wolf would protect her with its life. In the meantime, the Morrigan was set on self destruct as she scratched and clawed at the corners of Lydia's mind, demanding release. Lydia knew the moment she let go of her control, the moment the Morrigan got a toe hold on her psyche, there would be mutual blood letting. And somehow, Peter would be ok with that._

_She watched him go into her bathroom, return with a brush and a hair tie. "You were always so sensible. Everything in it's place. I like that." He set about brushing and braiding her hair._

"_I generally prefer your hair down. There aren't too many true gingers left, you know," he tugged lightly, slipping strand over strand. "But, we are heading out into the woods and I know certain concessions must be made. But this," tug, smooth, tug, "this is beautiful. You really have no idea how glad I am you got over that whole cutting it off phase you went through." She heard the ping and snap of the elastic as he finished. "There you go. Should make clean up a snap when we're done. Come on then," he took her hand and led her out of the house like a child._

"_Why didn't you just compel me," she asked as they made their way through the woods by the light of the moon. _

"_That's a good question," he said, not slowing their pace. "And one I don't have an answer for except to say you didn't respond."_

_She stopped. He had tried. Tried and failed._

_He paused and took her hand, leading her now. "Oh, don't go thinking you can just stop returning my calls. I'm not sure what it means, yet, but I'm certain it's only temporary. Either your power has surpassed mine, which we'll rectify shortly, or I just need a little boost to reconnect with that beautiful mind of yours."_

_The Nemeton rose before them suddenly, the stump of an ancient oak that had been brought from Ireland only to be cut down 400 years young. She wondered, as she did every time she saw it, why it had been cut down, and where the wood had gone. Across one side of it, she could see a swath, like a scar, where her own blood had stained it the last time they were here._

_Fueled by proximity to her power source, the Morrigan flew forward as though jumping into the skin of her limbs and rushed Peter. He caught her easily, carrying them both to the ground. She landed on top but Peter rolled quickly, wedging himself between knees that opened for him without resistance._

_He caressed her breast roughly through her sweater. "I believe this is cashmere, you might want to take it off before we go any further." He shrugged apologetically. "I'm afraid I chose it for its warmth, not its practicality. You'll just hate yourself in the morning if anything happens to it."_

_Lydia shed the sweater, trying to reign her power in before they both got hurt. The Morrigan had been growing increasingly wanton since almost killing Stiles, and wanted blood and power and sex. She wanted Peter even though he wasn't the rightful Hale Alpha, because tonight he was the most powerful one. Power she understood. Power she responded to. She could build this man into a King, set him on a throne of corpses and bathe in the blood of their enemies for lifetimes. _

_Lydia recoiled at her own thoughts, even as she and Peter tore at each other's clothes. This had to be what it felt like for the new wolves, so drunk on power, so fueled by the fire that lived within them they lost all sense of who they were and became the beast. She was coming into a power she didn't want, so she retreated into her mind even as she felt her own teeth sinking into the meaty flesh of Peter's shoulder. _

_She was Lydia Martin, she had degrees in Applied Mathematics from MIT, a Master's in particle physics from Princeton and a Phd. in Theoretical physics from Berkeley. She was published in the top scientific journals around the world. But what she had done was not who she was. It wasn't enough to hold her anchored to her sense of self. The Morrigan filled her with stars and fields of collapsing suns and enough secrets of the Universe to keep her in tenure for the rest of her life, candy thrown at a child for good behavior._

_Anchor. She needed an anchor. She was adrift on her own power. Awash in it. Drowning and being swept out sea. Peter roared, eyes flashing wolf blue. She saw those pale, cold eyes and realized his panic. He had slipped from Alpha back to beta without any pre-arranged consent. She hadn't taken the power from him and fed it back to Derek, it hadn't burned hot and bright in battle to fade away when it was no longer needed, it had slipped away in the night like an errant lover. He pinned her wrists to the forest floor where her hands curled like claws._

"_Well, little witch," he said, his voice thickening as his vocal chords changed and canines elongated in his mouth, "Now I think we're finally speaking the same language." She snapped at his face, her teeth coming together in sharp, staccato clicks just a breath away from connecting with skin. His laugh filled the forest around them._

_She wrapped her legs around his waist and gyrated her hips, growling when she encountered warm rough denim instead of hot flesh. _

"_Take. Them. Off." She said, her voice sounding foreign to her own ears._

_Her wrist slipped free as he tried to hold both of her hands in one large claw. Her hand came up under his shirt, found the seam and ripped, exposing bare skin to her. She lunged forward, licking the salt from his skin in one long stroke before sinking her teeth into the thick muscle between shoulder and neck. His hips thrust forward, heedless of the clothing still in the way._

_Peter tried to stand, tried to disentangle them long enough to get his own clothes off but she held on like a pitbull, tasting the sweet copper of his blood. Lydia felt herself slip farther way with every drop that touched her tongue._

_Above them, the moon hung gravid, red and bulbous in the sky, like a ripe fruit ready to drop from the tree. Lydia released him, shucked her skirt in one fluid movement that left her on her knees in front of him and made deft work of his button and zipper. He sprang free, large and heavy and ready for her. She slid her mouth around him and he groaned, hips thrusting toward her in spite of himself. His hands on her head, guiding her mouth before tightening and hauling her to her feet by a thick tangle of red hair._

"_You'll have to pardon my lack of enthusiasm," he said, spinning her roughly and pushing her toward the table top of the stump, "but your current state of mind leaves me a little concerned for my safety."_

_Without prompting she hoisted herself up on the stump, ignoring the prickle of the rough cut of the wood against her bare buttocks, ignoring the tear and the pull of splinters in the fine fabric of the camisole Peter had allowed her keep to on. She opened for him, her pale legs framing the pink flesh at the center, slick and shiny and hungry._

_Lydia knew what would come next, and in her current mood it wouldn't take long to get her there. She whined for him, like an animal in heat. Peter slid into her, pushing her knees back to her chest and thrusting hard. He hardly gave her a moment to catch her breath, to adjust to the girth of him before pulling back and slamming into her again. Her hands clutched at his back, digging deep furrows in his skin as he used his own weight to pin her legs near her shoulders. There was the sharp edge of desperation about him as he pistoned himself forward, their bodies meeting with the hard slap of flesh against flesh. Her back would be a ruin in the morning, but not even the pain of the abrasion was enough to put her back in control. The currents swirled around her, a riptide of power that was slowly drowning Lydia Martin and leaving the Morrigan in her wake._

_She couldn't catch her breath, the sound of Peter's breath like a locomotive in her ear. The Morrigan laughing as her hands came away from Peter's back slick with his blood. And her own building orgasm would be the final wave to push her under and drown her for good._

_**The concrete floor was cold under her hands and hard under her knees.**_

_The wood was warm under her back. _

_**He couldn't catch his breath.** She couldn't catch her breath. **His face was sweaty in her hands.** Her hands were sweaty and slick with his blood. **She pulled him to her, this strange boy who was suddenly her friend even though she didn't deserve him.** She held him to her, this man who would use her and consume her if it suited him._

_**His face in her hands.**_

_His face in her hands. _

_**Her hands. Her hands are so cold they're cramping but that's not what's making her cry. It's his eyes. Chocolate and whiskey and she's holding his shoulders under the water with everything she has and as he's drowning his eyes are still saying "I love you."**_

_She's holding his shoulders with everything she has and his eyes are red and feral and she's almost there when he says it. "Come for me, little witch." And she does._

_The pain of his claws buried in her skin isn't what brings her back into herself. Or the rush of power. Or even her own orgasm. _

_**She's sixteen again and she's kissing a boy who can't breathe. Kissing this strange sweet boy in a locker room surrounded by the stink of gym socks and old athletic equipment and none of this matters. It even seems strange to her that it should. **_

_**She's sixteen and she's watching her friends drown, and while Allison on one side of her has a werewolf to hold her under and Scott on the other has a Druid and magic to make sure the ritual happens, she's just sixteen years of bad temper and skinny arms and she doesn't know how this is going to work because at some point soon, instinct is going to kick in and she won't be able to keep this boy in the tub anymore. Even as the others start to thrash, those eyes are looking up at her through the ice and the mistletoe and she knows he would rather lay there and drown than risk hurting her by fighting her for air. And so he does. **_

_If she was his anchor twelve years ago, she knows he can be her anchor now and she crests the surface of the currents as the flood gates wash open. She has bled for the Nemeton again and The Morrigan is getting ready to push all that power into her chosen Sovereign, but Lydia decides tonight she's not a conduit. Tonight she's a reservoir and closes the gates. The power rushes into her and builds, and she screams as she holds it this time. She screams as she holds his image in her mind, her lost boy. The image of a kiss, a lifetime of lips pressed to lips, of Druidic glyphs traced on her in the predawn light, of her lips on his as she wicks her power away from him just as surely as she knows how to draw breath._

_She lets the currents fill her and fill her and fill her until she's sure she will die of it. But she's at that point now where she would rather die than let Peter have it, because if he's tapped out, Derek can take him._

_Peter is above her, her climax milking the orgasm from him when he grabs her throat and pins her to the Nemeton. His claws leave four little nicks in her throat and she feels the blood leak out of her in a thin trickle down the back of her neck. "Give it to me, little witch."_

_The Morrigan is thrashing inside her and she's afraid she's going to lose if she has to fight a battle on two fronts. This is becoming an emotional Waterloo, so she does what he asks, does what the Morrigan expects of her. She lets it blow out of her like a gust of wind, a tornado on a collision course for all those little locks and keys he was born with as a werewolf, all those little compartments in his soul made for magic. She lets him scream with the force and the agony of it before she takes it all back. Breathes it all back into herself like she did when she almost killed Stiles. Only this is no accident. She doesn't know if it's taken her twelve years to work the learning curve, or if her blood sacrifice has finally gifted her with more control, but she knows now she can pull it all back just as surely as she can push it before her like a tidal wave of power. It's not an act borne out of desperation, its a choice now. Because the Morrigan is hers. Is her now. And as she puts her hands on the tree to try to shove herself upright, Peter's blood on her joins her own as part of the sacrifice. The Nemeton approves. She likes sacrifices that come in threes. She has taken Lydia's blood twice and Peter's once and She is satisfied. Peter can feel it too as he stumbles away from her, suddenly ridiculous instead of dangerous as he trips over the pants that are still bunched at his ankles, and infinitely less endearing than Stiles was collapsed against her hallway wall._

"_I have a name," she says, the words rippling with power from her soul up through her mouth. She's dangerous right now, and he knows it._

"_There will still be others," he says, finding enough dignity to right himself, pull his pants up and sigh over the missing button._

_She sits on the tree stump, naked from the waist down and legs crossed demurely. Lydia imagines she paints the picture of a grisly Tinkerbell, splattered in blood rather than sparkles. She picks flakes of it out from under her nails, unconcerned with the lightening sky, her own nudity or the man in front of her._

"_I protected you for years. For years." He says, as though it should mean something more than it does. He looks at the shredded ruin of his shirt, then winces when he realizes the shredded ruin of his own back. It's refusing to heal just as surely as if the wounds had been put there by an Alpha._

"_You protected me like you protect the omegas in the pack. Just enough to get what you want from them. I don't need your protection anymore." She recrossed her legs in the other direction and started working on the nails of the opposite hand._

"_Just because you have power doesn't mean you know how to use it."_

"_I've learned, I think," she looked up at the stars dimming in the lightening sky, "And I think maybe it's time I start thinking about things I want. A family, maybe." _

_Peter laughed loud and heartily. "You don't understand your own power, do you Lyd-ee-a?" He chewed over each syllable of her name, waiting for her attention. Her head swiveled dreamily until in fixed on him._

"_Your power comes from death. You're a creature of night and darkness and nightmares. You are the embodiment of blood and war. Do you think anything can grow inside of you but hunger and hate?"_

_Inside the oubliette of her mind the Morrigan crowed triumphantly. _

"_Go home Peter. I haven't decided what to do about you yet." She hopped off the tree stump, and as she gathered her clothes she realized her dream had been about herself._

Stiles jerked away from her. He started walking back toward the house, his gait long with anger. He didn't more than a few paces before he turned and cocked his head to the side, his lips trembling.

"Please Lydia, please stop. I'll have to tell Scott, and Derek. Peter's an asshole and a snake, and, and any other repulsive thing you can think of but he's still a member of the pack. I'll have to tell Derek. And he'll tell Deaton. And they'll stop you." His voice cracked. "Please."

"It's too late." She replied patiently. "There isn't enough time to stop it. Besides, they couldn't anyway." Her own calm was almost as frightening to her as the Morrigan inspired frenzy was. It was like waking on a boat in the middle of a placid sea, completely unaware of how she got there.

Stiles rushed her, grabbed her by the lapel of her coat, but unable to bring himself to actually hurt her his momentum carried them both to the ground.

"Stiles, you know what he's been doing to me for years. It needs to end." This wasn't a whim. It had circled her mind since she had wandered home that Harvest moon, torn and bloody for the last time, looked in the mirror and told the Morrigan to shut the fuck up.

"Then just say no. You can say no. Just don't kill him." Stiles was reaching that level of frantic where he was starting to take large, gasping breaths like a tuna left beached and baking on the deck of a boat.

Lydia shook her head, grabbed his face and made him look at her when she spoke. "No. This is how I'm saying no. He has lived inside me since I was sixteen. You saw what he did to me then," She inched away from him on her knees, left him crouching and sagging on the forest floor while she stood in a patch of moonlight. She took off her gloves and shoved them each into a pocket. "You know what we've been doing since. And you know Peter. I've crossed a line with him and he is the sorest of losers."

"What, was he a bad lay or something," Stiles shot back. There were tears on his face now. He was grasping at straws. Grasping at the trivial. The easy fix. "What is Derek going to say the next time you fuck him? He may not care that you killed Peter, but you better believe he's going to care that you killed a member of his pack!"

She unfastened her coat, let it slide off her shoulders. There was the unfortunate grain of truth to his words. Derek would understand why she had to kill Peter, but he would probably never forgive her for it. Even if he was never cruel, their easy affection would be gone. It was just one more thing she was going to have to let go of. Her coat collapsed in the leaves behind her with a soft rush of sound. Stiles stared, fascinated and horrified as she unbuttoned her shirt.

"Don't be obtuse, Stiles," she said as she pulled the ends of the shirt out of her waist band and let it fall with her jacket so that she stood bare in the moonlight, a deep rose camisole her only armor before she was flayed and exposed. "This isn't about sex. It's about protection." She crossed her arms and slipped the flimsy fabric over her head, standing in front of Stiles bare chested, her scars finally on display.

"Every time, Stiles, every time we were together, this is what he did to me. Every time since I was sixteen." She could see the bile rising in him as he looked at her, then looked away. "I've turned every possibility over in my head, and I've seen every outcome. You know that's what I do." She paused, making sure he was listening to her and not just hearing her words. For the first time she noticed the creases in his brow, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. They weren't sixteen anymore. "I can't say no forever. He had some kind of hold on me, and I can't risk him digging in and holding on again." She said the last through bared teeth and clenched fists.

She didn't bother to put her shirt back on before she knelt in front of him, took his hand and slid his fingers along her side so he could feel how thick and ridged the furrows were, her flesh laid open once or twice a year for the past decade. "I can't say no because he's inside of me. Always. I don't know how to get him out. So all I can do, is make sure he stays locked up in here where he can't hurt me." She tapped her head before cupping his face.

"All I'm doing is taking back twelve years worth of power. I'm just taking back everything I gave him, because it's mine and he took it from me first."

Stiles reached out and touched her with tender fingers. "I always thought, yknow, you were self conscious about the _old_ scar." He ran his thumb over the track of Peter's claws, pressed a little to feel the thickness of it, now only two months old. "That time, when I tasted the blood on you, I thought 'werewolf sex'. And Jackson, Jackson used to say you got pretty rough."

She didn't move, waiting for him to finish his exploration in silence. Inside her, within the stillness, was a new and abiding sorrow, and she knew it had to be as much a part of who she was now as the power she was coiling inside herself. She was _becoming_. All births were painful, and hers had taken twelve years.

"I'll talk to Scott. We'll make sure he never touches you again. I'll kill him myself, first." Lydia thought he sounded like he was working his way through the five stages of grief, and maybe he was. He had moved on to bargaining. She had to get him to acceptance. And then she had to let him go.

Her own grieving had started in a hospital bed when she was barely sixteen, and matured when she had almost killed her best friend.

_It was a rare quiet moment together, surrounded by boxes in her new house, sitting on the living room floor eating pizza because furniture hadn't been delivered yet. She was tired and in pain. Stiles had picked her up from the edge of the woods two nights before and let her shower at his apartment, quietly handing her a towel through the door, tucking her into his bed and sleeping on the couch. She had wanted to say thank you, but he wouldn't talk to her about it. _

"_I hope you realize you're my best friend," she tried to say casually around a mouthful of deep dish and pepperoni._

"_What about Allison?" He got up and fetched himself a beer from her fridge._

"_If I slept with Scott, Allison would gut me like a fish. And you would hand me the first aid kit. That makes you my best friend."_

_He leaned against the fridge, pondering her words. And she couldn't help but notice the tug at the edges of his mouth as he fought a smile. _

"_Well," he said, sitting down and offering her a sip of his beer, "Just don't expect me to go shoe shopping with you or anything."_

She didn't think she would ever make him smile again. That loss created a quarry of emptiness in her she was slowly filling with power.

Her eyes flared. She felt it, like a sudden intensity in night vision, a crispness around the edges of everything, and she saw the mixture of fascination and horror on Stiles face. She blinked at the strangeness of it. Werewolves had three colors; the red alpha, the yellow beta, and the unfortunate blue that showed a soul tainted by the taking of innocent blood.

"What color are they," she whispered.

He swallowed. "Green. Like traffic lights." She imagined them bright earthen green. The color of oak leaves and forest moss. She understood the wolves so much better now, and wondered if this was what she was meant to be all along. What had started out as a desperate attempt at self determination was becoming a transformation. She had wasted so many years as a conduit, a supernatural aquaduct taking power from the Beacon Hills currents and funneling it back and forth between Derek and Peter that she had never stopped to consider that it was supposed to be hers all along. She wasn't 'a' Guardian, she was 'the' Guardian. The Morrigan was a goddess demanding tribute, she should have never been the tribute herself. She was fixing that tonight. Her tribute was Peter Hale.

There were no words to describe the pain on Stiles' face. It was the loss of illusion and grief for a friend. She couldn't imagine he had looked anymore pitiful when he was an eight year old boy alone with his dying mother.

The woman named Lydia Martin was something else now, and the girl he had known and loved was gone. He had worshiped the Maiden, loved the Mother, but Lydia had found her Crone aspect; not just the harbinger of death but the bringer. She supposed he had to know this day would come. He was a Druid, and Emissary in his own right, and he knew what she was. Denial could only get a person so far.

"Why didn't you tell me," she said, reaching toward him. "You had to have known. You had to."

"I thought I could protect you, if you didn't know."

"Didn't know what," she whispered.

Before he could answer, the last of Peter filtered into her pool of energy like a siphon suddenly sucking dry. She reached out toward him, grabbed that last little bit of Peter that he had been able to hold onto when they had burned and slashed and buried him and felt it snap into her with a force that made her stumble forward. Stiles reached out to catch her, but she flung her arms wide to catch herself as the Morrigan burned to life. He recoiled from the power, like jerking away from a live wire. She gulped air in a ragged, sucking breath just as the howls went up around them. She threw her arms open and welcomed it all.

A wind whistled through the bare limbs of the trees, whipping loose hairs from her braid around her face. She and the Morrigan slid together like puzzle pieces, two objects inhabiting the same space at the same time. The Nemeton was her mother now, but not her Master, and the Morrigan a fractured piece of her soul fitted back into place to make her whole.

She knew what Stiles didn't want to tell her. The wind whispered it to her, the secret he had been trying to protect her from even as he rushed forward and clutched her to him, heedless of the consequences. They were twenty eight but he was still theat same sixteen year old boy who stepped in a puddle of gasoline to save his friend from desolation and a lighted flare. She could remember that sixteen year old girl with bittersweet feelings, but she wasn't her anymore. Stiles gasped at the onslaught of energy in her, his eyes wild and frightened.

"Death begets death, Lydia," he shouted into her ear above the noise of the wolves and the wind.

"I know," she said, arms still wide.

"You had to kill him to become the Morrigan. Sometimes, the child doesn't mature until the parent has passed on."

Her skin itched and crawled and she wondered for a moment if this aspect had a form, like the werewolves. She shook her head, wrapping her arms around Stiles and returning his embrace. Her voice sounded fierce and terrible in her own ears, and Stiles' eyes widened in shock as she spoke. "Peter had to be stopped. I didn't want to become this, but Peter couldn't be allowed to control it, to control me. To become the victor, I have to _be _the victor."

She felt her skin stretch and split, the power taking one more sacrifice from her. Stiles screamed at the feel of her blood soaking into his clothes and warming his skin. The wind tore at them like a cyclone as she grabbed his face and calmed him with a kiss before stepping back, lifting her face to the sky and joining the wolves with her own voice. Looking down at herself, she saw her scars separate, the bone, muscle and fascia all clearly visible before healing into perfect, unblemished skin.

The wind tore at their hair and clothes in one last gust before whispering against the sleeping bark and dead leaves and quieting to an eerie nothing.

"I didn't want you to have to kill, Lydia. The darkness was supposed to be around _my_ heart. _Mine_! I didn't want you to have to become," he motioned at her with his hand, all windblown and wild eyed, "I didn't want you to have to become 'her'."

Lydia kissed him gently on the forehead. "I was always her. The only difference is now I'm in control."

Peter was gone, cossetted in a corner of her mind where he couldn't hurt her or her pack anymore. She had had to sacrifice herself to save herself, and she had to sacrifice her friendships to save her friends. Even Ms. Blake had gotten the definition of sacrifice wrong. Sacrifices weren't random offerings, true sacrifice came from the heart, and her heart was breaking with it. Peter had been right, she was the embodiment of blood and war, and with that came collateral damage. She had spent twelve years trying not to hurt anyone, and had been fileted alive for it.

Her scream echoed over the hills, a keening that was more than the banshee announcing the passing of the dead, she was mourning her own losses. And tonight it was as much a warning as an announcement. She was the Hale family banshee, and their territory was under her protection. Beacon Hills had a Guardian, and she was done fucking around.


End file.
